Mail is incredibly slow since updating to El Capitan

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Level 1

17 points

Mail is incredibly slow since updating to El Capitan

Hey,

I'm using Mac OS X El Capitan v. 10.11.1 on a MacBook Pro, 2.8 GHz i7 with 16 Gb of RAM. I'm on a 50 Mbit DSL line.

I never had any problems with sending or receiving Mail. But since I upgraded to El Capitan Mac Mail has gotten incredibly slow and almost unusable. It will take up to 10 minutes to load a simple text email or a small image attachment (under 1MB). I don't have these problems when downloading something from a website. Downloading a file of 3 MB takes 1-2 seconds.

Also sending emails is incredibly slow. It takes several minutes, also just for plain-text mails.

And then Mac Mail often seems to synchronize even though there are no new messages. It displays "loading 10 of 32 messages" which is stuck and loads forever. And nothing will get through until I restart Mac Mail several times.

I'm managing 5 IMAP accounts with Mac Mail, which is more than usual but not an absurd number. Plus I never had problems before. They are partly Google App accounts and partly Zoho.com.

Apple: What can I do to get a usable Mail program back? I don't want to switch but I have to consider it if it takes 10 minutes for an attachment to load.

Thanks

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Late 2013), OS X El Capitan (10.11.1)

Posted on Dec 7, 2015 8:31 AM

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Answer 1

ole_berlin Author

Level 1

17 points

Dec 7, 2015 8:45 AM in response to ole_berlin

What solved it for me (found here in the forum):

Make backup
Close mail
Copy folder ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail to a different location (in case something goes wrong)
Delete the folder ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail
Restart mail

You will have to reconfigure some parts of mail, but it is now much faster. Let's see if that stays true.

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Answer 2

Dec 13, 2015 1:45 AM in response to ole_berlin

I've had a problem with emails taking a long time to download in Mail but only since the most recent update to El Capitan 10.11.2, which I downloaded 9th December. It only appears to be messages from my iCloud account (.mac.com address and aliases) and not any of the addresses I have from my ISP, which are POP. Also, I've noticed a slight delay in sending emails too, resulting in the Outbox showing '1' next to it for a few moments.

One thing is that even if I take all accounts offline, the Activity window still shows something as Connecting and the only way to get the messages previously stuck on downloading (always from my .mac.com address) to be retrieved is to quit Mail and then relaunch it.

In fact, before I did the last update, Mail in El Capitan seemed faster than previous versions!

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Answer 3

spirit

Level 1

45 points

Mar 14, 2016 8:56 AM in response to ole_berlin

Thanks for that tip. I upgraded from Mavericks to El Capitan last week and Apple Mail has been sluggish. But deleting that Containers folder restored the snappy functionality to Mail.

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Answer 4

Jul 28, 2016 7:05 AM in response to ole_berlin

Hi, Thanks for the posting.

iMac with later El Capitan and out of the blue, a month or so ago, attached,ends like jpgs and pdfs took an age - icon was there with a small progress bar showing and eventually, the thing downloaded.

Tried the delete the folder mentioned and a test 8meg pdf loaded as expected.

Yes I had to reconfigure the layout as I like it but success.

Steve

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Answer 5

Oct 5, 2016 1:08 PM in response to ole_berlin

Hi, sorry to be a pain but please can you explain the above process in more detail?

I'm really new to mac so can't even locate the folder you are referring to in your post.

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