Heavy Mail Use Slowdown...Upgrade Advise

[mailman199]

I'm currently using a late 2016 15" MBP with 2.9 i7 and 16gb of RAM. I use mail constantly and have 33 accounts setup; a lot of gmail, some Yahoo and Exchange, and a couple iCloud. I'm getting a ton of beachballs and delays with typing and scrolling. I did a rebuild and it made little change. Two questions:

1) Is there anything else I should be looking at as a software issue for the slowdown.

2) Would getting the MBP with the i9 make a significant difference? Significant difference going to 32gb RAM?

 

[velocityg4]

Open activity monitor. See if the CPU and/or RAM is being maxed out. For RAM if memory pressure is in yellow or red. You need more RAM.

Normally I'd suggest trying Thunderbird. As it is light on resources and a speedy e-mail app. Unfortunately it does not support Exchange. With some specific exceptions using an add-on (Exchange 2007 and 2010 via Exchange Web Services).

With all that e-mail. How is your storage doing? An SSD over 80% full starts seeing slow downs, significantly over 90%. If using an external HDD. Try switching to an external Thunderbolt NVMe SSD.

 

[pshufd]

I've had this problem in the past with both Apple Mail on the Mac and Apple Mail on the iPhone. Cleaning out my inboxes and moving things to folders helped considerably.

I use Thunderbird work work email but prefer Apple Mail for personal mail because it has a unified Inbox. Thunderbird is also a more complex email solution and has some of its own quirks, and it can have performance problems with large inboxes too but it's easy to archive off parts of your inbox. The other nice thing is that you can download the source code, make changes and rebuild if you want to customized Thunderbird.

So my recommendation would be to clean up your individual inboxes.