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Mail.app + 40 Gigs of email + imap = slow

R

rawktavio

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 17, 2007
3
0
Hi,

So here's a unique problem that maybe one of you hotshots can help solve. I have a boss who gets alot of email, his current mail folder on his computer(s) is getting to be over 40 gigs, and this is after archiving. I've tried entourage (4gb limit) powermail, thunderbird, and of course mail. In fact I'm using mail right now and here's where the slow down appears.

Mail tends to multi-task, ie syncing and caching and the what not. So when the big boss tries to check mail or even view a new message, it can be a minute or more just to view the new message, meanwhile apple's mail is spining it's rainbow colored wheel on caching or syncing a unrelated folder.

Is there a work around for this? I'm running the latest incarnation of exchange and he's connected using imap. He has a fast connection of course and is using the latest version of Mail on Leopard with a fast machine.

Any help would be appreciated, any useless criticism of course is rubbish.
 
Does the sqlite trick work/help in Leopard? (Vacuuming the sqlite database periodically speeds up Mail significantly in Tiger when one has a large e-mail collection).

The other thought...hmmm...how wedded are you to all of those requirements -- using IMAP, having that much mail on the server, and using Mail.app? It seems that the first two things are really a difficult thing for you to ever find a fix for. Most likely a significant amount of your delay is simply that, with that much mail on-server, it inevitably takes a long time for any mail application to check in on whether the inbox status is up-to-date.

It would seem like POP might actually perform better in this kind of scenario.

That being said, though... you tried T-Bird, what about any Penelope-related betas of the open-source Eudora successor? IIRC, Eudora was supposed to be relatively better than most mail applications at very large mailboxes.
 
mkrishnan said:
Does the sqlite trick work/help in Leopard? (Vacuuming the sqlite database periodically speeds up Mail significantly in Tiger when one has a large e-mail collection).
Click to expand...

Worked with Leopard for me. Just ran and it reduced my mail database by ~19%. And my database was only 8MB to begin with. OPs database will be huge and it would be well worth running it. There are a few different approaches to running it which are detailed here
 
thanks, i'm going to give it a try and i'll let you know how well it works.
 
xUKHCx said:
Worked with Leopard for me. Just ran and it reduced my mail database by ~19%. And my database was only 8MB to begin with. OPs database will be huge and it would be well worth running it. There are a few different approaches to running it which are detailed here
Click to expand...

wow! thanks for the tip, although my mail database was not huge, it did make a difference, mail feels snappier now

I chose the automator method described here:

http://automatorworld.com/archives/mail-vacuum/

thanks a lot xUKHCx :D
 
You said it's slowing down because it's doing too much at once... what if you bring up the activity monitor, stop all the actions, then get mail? Or does that cause mail to do everything that you don't want it to do in the first place?
 
You all are totally right he doesn't need access to all of it, but he's the guy who can get away for asking this, he's the owner of a several million dollar company.

I've moved a ton of email that was older than june of this year to a local folder in mail, that way it wouldn't be on our server and wouldn't synchronize at all. Right now I'm backing up the whole user folder and what not so that if anything happens, i'll have a fail over.

Again i'll keep you up to date as how it goes after i:

1. run the mailbox fix
2. switch over to only download read messages
 
I am not an expert on that, but one of the problems might be the configuration of the mail server. I think, if a mailbox of several GB in size is stored in a single mbox file, the whole file has to be read each time a message is accessed. Other mailbox formats which don't use a single file would be a better choice. But then I guess with 40 GB it still will be slow.
 
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