Q: Mail slow after Sierra upgrade

Same problem here. Spotlight for Mail & Messages already off...  Very annoying.

Not only is Mail slow for me, some of the keyboard combinations don't work. If I reply to a message or compose a new one, SHIFT+CMD+D does absolutely nothing. The only way I can send mail is to save it to the drafts folder and send it from there. (They keyboard combination works on emails in the drafts folder.)

(Mail isn't the only place where the keyboard doesn't work—SHIFT+arrow does not select icons correctly.)

Apple might try using Mail—and Macs—in their offices; then we would not see so many bugs and weirdities.

Actually turning off Spotlight for Mail & Messages didn't make a big difference after all.

So, turning off Spotlight is not a solution or work around that takes care of the problem. Speed increase and improvement in responsiveness is only a fraction of the damage caused by Sierra update.

I turned off the Spotlight indexing and then did a Mailbox > Rebuild.

Does seem faster.

Yep, I have this same problem. Additionally, typing in Mail.app on Sierra (10.12) will randomly freeze for about half a second, every ten seconds or so. It's super annoying, and makes Mail almost totally unusable.

I have problems with the dreaded spinning beachball. That did not happen with my previous Mac OS. Any ideas how to cure the problems with Sierra?

Spotlight didn't really work - it did make it a bit faster but not like it was. Also I tried clearing the cache which seems to help somewhat  ~\library\cache. Thoughts

(first time poster here so go easy )

Christian

Reindexing mailboxes helped me a bit.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2476217/mac-os-x/mac-os-x-how-to-fix-apple- mail-by-rebuilding-and-reindexing-the-mailbox.html

Above are the instructions except "~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData" should be "~/Library/Mail/V4/MailData".

It also took some time to reindex spotlight after the operation. Checking the Activity Monitor will help you to follow at least when the spotlight is done ("mds_stores" finishes consuming the cpu).

I tried the "reindexing" method (involving deleting the envelope indexes), but Mail remains as stubbornly slow as ever.

I think this is probably because I'm running it on a 2011 iMac, which is now old enough to no longer be a machine that system updates get tested on. There's probably nothing to be done now except to eBay this computer and reluctantly purchase a new one.

I guess it makes a lot of economic sense to not test out new system updates on old hardware—boy was I ever dumb for upgrading! (I'm not even using any of the new features, like... Siri, and nothing else!)

I am going to wait until this is fixed before upgrading from El Cap to Sierra on my 2011 iMac.

You are correct in that age is not a factor. Sierra and all my email accounts are working fine on all my Macs, including iMacs and portables as old as that.

If you wish, you can install Sierra on a separate partition and configure Mail. To do that read Upgrading to macOS "Sierra" without fear.

Boot to that volume. If Mail works for you while using it, you can import your Mailboxes using Mail for Mac: Import or export mailboxes.

That would certainly help advance troubleshooting.

That spotlight trick worked for me as well. A shame that we have to do that, though, as I've used spotlight to find things in Mail many times.