Mail under Mountain Lion is painfully slow / unusable

I have found a work-around for this particular issue:

"At various times, hitting the mail icon on the dock has no effect. The same is true with Command+TAB"

I've tried all of the previously mentioned suggestions with no luck.

For example, if I'm in Safari and then I click the Mail icon in the dock, Mail will not come up, no matter how many times I hit it. If I'm in a chat window and I see mail in the background, I can click on the Mail window but the chat window stays in the foreground and I cannot get to Mail. Sometimes if I click enough times Mail will finally come up. Same with Alt + Tab.

At various times it works just fine.

Although, if I right click on the mail icon and click on "Inbox" then Mail will appear (sometimes).

I have found that if I go full-screen with Mail, I have absolutely no issues. I can simply use the 4-finger upward swipe for mission control to access anything else that's open in Desktop1 and then when I'm ready to go back to mail, I can just click on that in the Dock. I realize this isn't a fix, but right now I will take a work-around over the frustration. I thought I'd pass it along in case that helps anyone else out.

This fixed mine, All I had to do was deselect SSL.... works great!! Thank you!!!

Looks like I need to be added to the list. A whole skew of issues have happened since I initially installed ML on my 27" iMac including a failed hard drive. Knowing that the hardware issue has nothing to do with software I think that it definitely helped it go out as fast as possible because of the constant hanging. I just replaced hard drive and did a fresh installation of ML and still constant issues with hanging. I feel like I am using a windows machine again.

I am having the specific issues in this thread regarding hanging in Mail mostly after going into Preferences > Accounts. It will go unresponsive for several minutes and it's quite frustrating. Honestly I had no issues with any application under Snow Leopard or Lion.

I feel like Mountain Lion might be the worst OS to date.

Same here... slow like **** on a 27" iMac. Had to switch to Sparrow to get my computer flowing.

THANK YOU!!!!!

I've been trying to fix this on and off for about two weeks now. Your instructions were the missing piece of the puzzle.

Very much appreciated!

Add me to the Mail painfully slow list!

Clearing caches and Reparing permissions work for a while but after some usage Mail will become painfully slow again so I have to repeat the process.

I'm sure someone at Apple is looking into this, right??

Anyone had the same issue after some usage that it becomes slow again?

This worked for me...

Under icloud, untick everything. Then sign out of icloud.

Click the Finder icon, click Go in the menu bar & hold Option/Alt and you should see Library appear, click it when it does , Navigate to Application Support and move the AddressBook folder to the trash.

Restart Your Computer

Empty the trashcan.

Open mail, put in your email address details.

Then go into icloud, re log in, and it will re sink with my contacts that I had stored on my iphone, and now it works perfect.

I tried that and it has worked for a while but again after some usages, it has become slow again.

I did save the previous recipient document as I want to keep that and not erase that.

I have been dealing with sluggish Mail performance since upgrading to ML three days ago (macbook pro, 8GB, 2.7GHz,, i7). After almost giving up and waiting for apple to eventually come with a fix I tried the procedure Sangoma suggested. After restarting, Mail is speedy and is working like it had done under Lion before the upgrade. Don't know if this will solve everyones problem, but it definitely seems to have solved mine.

Here is a fix that will definitely work for some of you:

Open the console app (its in the Applications/Utilities folder) and type 'Mail' into the filter window.

If you see a whole lot of recent entries that look more or less like this:

Mail: deny file-read-data /Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist

you are about to solve a few Mail problems.

1. Close Mail.

Open the Finder, choose 'go to folder' from the 'Go' menu', and type

2. ~/Library/Preferences and press Go.

3. In the folder that opens up, delete the file com.apple.mail.list. Go ahead, it safe, you wont lose anything at all - its a settings file that is not in use.

4. Restart Mail.

Trust me, if you find the error in your console, this will help Mail for many who have Mail plugins and the slow Mail problem.

Good luck!

Hi there, thanks much for your advice.

It seems that the problem is solved in Mac 10.8.2. Did you guys find the same?

Yes, 10.8.2 seems to have corrected the previous issues I was having with Mail. The new issue that 10.8.2 has presented is that if I click the Reply or Forward button from within the mail message:

(as opposed to in the main Mail toolbar) it brings up two message boxes for me to type my reply/forward message (the second one being behind the first). If I click the reply/forward button in the toolbar it only brings up the one message box as normal. I haven't checked yet to see if anyone else has posted this issue on a new thread.

Mail has got worse under 10.8.2. It opens - but as soon as you start to do anything, even open the preference file, the dreaded beachball starts. Have tried all of the above fixes - to no avail. HELP !

This fixed my problem after the 10.8.2 update. Even after changing the SSL settings the "sandbox" was making mail quite sluggish. All better after deleting the com.apple.mail.plist.

Thanks!!

Sangoma wrote:

Here is a fix that will definitely work for some of you:

Open the console app (its in the Applications/Utilities folder) and type 'Mail' into the filter window.

If you see a whole lot of recent entries that look more or less like this:

Mail: deny file-read-data /Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist

you are about to solve a few Mail problems.

1. Close Mail.

Open the Finder, choose 'go to folder' from the 'Go' menu', and type

2. ~/Library/Preferences and press Go.

3. In the folder that opens up, delete the file com.apple.mail.list. Go ahead, it safe, you wont lose anything at all - its a settings file that is not in use.

4. Restart Mail.

Trust me, if you find the error in your console, this will help Mail for many who have Mail plugins and the slow Mail problem.

Good luck!

the addressbook 'fix' worked for me for about a week and now i am back to the same frustrations. this makes Mail absolutely unusable in this state. soooo bummed and might have to revert to an alternative mail client. which i dont want to do... i like mail!