Mail under Mountain Lion is painfully slow / unusable

just in case that wasnt clearI meant:

Check your SMTP settings

Had the same issue. Go to the SMTP server settings and uncheck "Use SSL". My system was re-checking it automatically so I had to click on "Use custom port" enter 587 there and uncheck "Use SSL"

This seems to have worked brilliantly

Dean

Hi Deanofhallow, thanks for your recommendations but I'm slightly unsure as this setting is not the recommended settings of Gmail.

Are there any consequences switching over to this setting? Did it work for others?

Thanks.

It may be, but doesnt seem to be effecting my use of gmail... it is still working as a fix very effectively, mail is as fast as it ever was

Dean

Thanks to Paul Raphaël.

Re: Mail under Mountain Lion is painfully slow / unusable

Aug 7, 2012 1:45 PM ( in response to juanjosess)

After trying everything listed in this thread without succes, deleting the following finally solved my problem:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail

~/Library/Application Support/SyncServices

Hope this helps!

After finally getting iCloud turned off (had to go uncheck enabled in Contacts to keep it from coming back), I still had slow mail but not AddressBookSync forever. Deleting the two files mentioned above seems to have restored mail to working order. Really wanted to like iCloud but it has made a mess both performance wise and with how Calendar sync doesn't work the same.

My experience was pretty much the same, though I don't believe it is an iCloud issue. My hypothesis is that there is something in the Apple Mail client that is corrupting the files you suggest we delete that is bogging the app down. I use my work-provided gmail account primarily, and still had the same problem.

I also found that running the following commands in Terminal (which someone else suggested somewhere in this thread) did also provide a further marginal performance improvement.

sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Envelope\ Index vacuum;

bluedevil: I'm don't think it was all iCloud but I had a lot of duplicate contacts in iCloud that were being synced and finding address for new emails was very slow. Keeping that all updated was making the whole machine (Mid-2007 iMac) slow. Thanks for vacuum suggestion.

Absolutely unbelievable. I've been suffering with this Mail problem for months, and I've posted in several threads here in the Apple forum. I've had every cockamamie 'fix' from reinstalling Mountain Lion to throwing chicken bones, and none of them worked. Until this one.

Thanks!

PS: Why do I have a handful of mail.plist aliases?? One of the many answers was getting rid of old plist files, which works for a day or so, but I can't trash or otherwise get rid of the aliases.

After trying all the solutions offered also still struggling. Have managed to work out I think that it is the emails with attachments causing the issue. No attachments or small size appears ok but as soon as any significant sized attached or perhaps graphic comes in then the problem reoccurs.

sdpate - doesn't matter if you're male or female if you were standing next to me I'd kiss you right on the lips for this fix!!! Thank you!! That %$##*@& problem was driving me totally nuts!!!

Turns out this only partly fixed my problem. For whatever reason, many, many mail.plist files had been being created. If I trashed them, the problem got better for a few days, then returned. It's been a couple of weeks now, and the only mail.plist file I can find is a couple of days old. However, the old aliases are still there, but I still can't get rid of them. The system won't let me drag the aliases to the trash, so they're stuck there. Mail is still MUCH slower than it used to be under previous versions of the OS.

Apple, if you guys are reading this thread, you ***really*** need to do something about this. It's 2013, and this is like a 1989 kind of problem. Reminds me of System 7 (shudders...)

thank you sdpate..this answer solved my problem as well!

Tried this after a significant slow down of my iMac ( mid-2011, Mountain Lion, 8 Gigs of RAM). Got a boost.

Thank you!

Indy

I have had a nightmare with Mail after a clean install, migrating it manually from Leopard, via a custom SL build. I tried all the solutions here, and none worked, however.... When I turned Filevault encryption off my startup disk, everything is fine! I actually wanted it on, but am scared to turn it back on now lest I lose more days productivity, so if this works for anyone, and you have things still working after you turn it back on, do let me know.

Justin

Retina MacBook Pro (SSD)

I think I have some bad news for everyone suffering on this thread. 3 weeks ago, I got a brand new 13-inch 2.6GHz MBP with Retina display (8GB RAM / 256GB Flash). I did not import anything from by old MBP, but rather pulled everything down from the cloud (iCloud, Dropbox, Google, etc.) and set all my settings from scratch.

This machine is fast. Office apps load in a blink. Web pages scream. Filters applied in a blink. Mail still crawls.

To me, this suggests 1 of 2 things...1) Mail does not play well with GMail (which is what my employer uses, so I have no choice) or 2) Mail does not handle large mail stores well (I have a large mail archive).

I'm guessing it is some combination of both things in my case and there are fundamental architectural flaws in the Mail app that Apple needs to fix. More and more people are using GMail and mail stores grow with time, so…Apple…please fix this. I spend more time in Mail than any other app on my computer and this is really cramping my productivity…and apparently lots of other people.

thebluedevil wrote:

so…Apple…please fix this. I spend more time in Mail than any other app on my computer and this is really cramping my productivity…and apparently lots of other people.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Cheers

Pete