Why is mail running so slow

Hi all.

I´ve had this problem as well with mail running in slowmotion. Read forums and tried a number of fancy fixes even in the terminal which is scary to me. Last night I sat and looked at the mail window and for some reason dragged the window down. Normally I prefer to switch between apps rather than having lots of windows visible at the same time. When the window after a couple of minutes moved down a bit I discover there was a similar window behind, hidden by the one I just managed to move. To make this slowmotion story shorter: There were maybe a hundred mail windows on top of one other. How that had come to be I don´t know. When I had managed to delete them one by one everything was back to normal. Hope this help someone, at least it helped me!

Svante, to avoid this in the future, I suggest opening System Preferences (under the Apple logo in the menu bar), choosing "General", and checking "Close Windows When Quitting an Application".

embea's solutions seems to work for me~ Just don't know what's the mechanism here?

Just upgraded to OS X Maverick (10.9) and my Apple Mail was terribly slow. Rebuild the mailboxes, as already mentioned by others for older OS X versions, did the trick.

Go to "Mailbox" in the menu bar and choose "Rebuild".

I also have this incredibly irritating problem. I basically can not use my mail app, because when it's running it(and my whole mac) get's stupidly slow very fast.

I had this problem before as well, I think I managed to fix the problem that time by randomly deleting some (corrupt?) mails.

I have no copy of mail.plist in my system.

I have rebuilt my inbox with no results

I don't know how to fix this, it's really bothering

Apple should come up with a solution.

I have: Snow Leopard v. 10.6.8.

This solved my problem. Thanks! I also tried to rebuild my mail and it erased everything in my inbox. THankfully, I also have it on icloud so I can recover it. Now I just have to figure out why my iphone, macbook air and intel imac are not seeing the same mail.

Add me to the list of people who had this problem. I am running 10.8.5. Nothing had worked until I followed embea's instructions. I have no idea what it did but Mail is running somewhat normal now.

Thank you Embea! I'm been loking for a answer for this and it's been killing me! Finally some progress.

I'm amazed, that this big problem still exsists and apple lets this happen.

I used the index vacuum command noted above. Made the mail run much faster. However, I noticed that spotlight is now rebuilding its index. Fine with that if the mail program keep running at speed. Hope Mac is not becoming the new Windows, where it's a succession of chewing gum and bailing wire fixes to keep it riding between the ditches.

My icloud is now unusable. The reason I switched to Apple was because of problems with Windows crashing and going slow. It seems that the technology behemoths just can't help but get complacent.

I don't want to know how to improve icloud. How do I extricate myself from it?

Any advice or ideas are welcome.

Old Apple Fan fast becoming an Android user

Apple Orange wrote:

I don't want to know how to improve icloud. How do I extricate myself from it?

Turn it off -

On your Mac, System Preferences > iCloud > Sign Out

On your iPhone, iPad, etc., Settings > iCloud > Delete Account

Enjoy Android.

Ha ha! Great solution! Thank you suberman, I'd never thought of that.

I just tried the command line for OSX 10.9.2 Mavericks and it still seems to help! Program starts faster en checks mail faster... now I just hope that nothing was unknowingly messed up. So far so good! So, that was:

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

Ok, it's not funny anymore. I'm using Mail Version 7.3 (1878.2) on 10.9.3 and it working really really slow. I'm doing every day vacuum but it not help too much.

I never had a problem 3-4 years ago! 😟 Is there any way to improve Mail? I already tired vacuum and rebuild options, I even deleted from my imap server a lot of e-mails but problem still exist. This is nightmare, I cannot work!

I'm on 10.9.5, recently upgraded from 10.8.5(?), and Mail was extremely slow after the upgrade - minutes to display the contents of an email message. Rebuild and manual force of reindexing had no effect.

I wasn't getting sandboxing errors from Mail, but deleting the Mail user plist fixed the performance problem. I didn't have a system Mail plist.