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Mail.app very slow to complete addresses

After upgrading my 2011 MBP to 10.7, I find that the Mail.app is now very slow - many many seconds - to provide completion suggestions when adding addressees in "To", "Cc" and so on. The address book app itself is very speedy as it used to be in 10.6. The Mail.app was very speedy also in 10.6 on providing completions.


I have tried completely re-indexing Spotlight via the routine of dragging the "Macintosh HD" to be not indexed and then later deleting it and seeing that Spotlight indeed re-indexed after some hours.


"Contacts" is checked in the Spotlight preferences and the expected contacts do show up in Spotlight searches.


I looked about the "Mac OS X v10.7 Lion" "Mail and Address book" list but haven't found any other such issues.

Posted on Aug 13, 2011 1:41 AM

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9 replies

Sep 1, 2011 9:47 PM in response to RHYC

I tried to delete the file MailCents-v4.abcdmr under the directory /User/YourUserName/Library/Application Support/AddressBook, then it become speedy in auto completing the address. You may want to try and see if it helps, but you will probably lose all the email addresses that are not in your addressbook.

Nov 15, 2011 12:51 PM in response to xristy

Thanks this works for me too.

From looking in Terminal at this file, it seems that the file I had previously did not have the Read permission for user and group enabled. This can be enabled with "chmod a+r <file>".

When I have Mail.app recreate the file it seems to create it with Read enabled across the board so this is probably right.

Having enabled read permissions the address complete times are much improved however still not instant. The old version of the file was 131k where as the Mail.app recreated version is only 40k and gives instant auto complete results. As pointed out above, the difference will be the addresses not in your address book.

Mail.app very slow to complete addresses

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