MAIL is a memory hog on Snow Leopard

I've tried everything, and my iMac and MacBook Pro both quickly run out of memory. They both had 2GB. Then I upgraded my iMac to 4GB, but this didn't help at all. If I reboot my iMac (Intel Core 2 Duo 3.2GHz Aluminium), then there is lots of memory available, however after a few hours, Mail seems to be the hog.

Mail hogs around 550 Real memory and 1.5GB Virtual Mem, Safari hogs 490 MB real mem and 500MB, even the kernel task hogs around 300MB real mem.

So normally my situation is quite bleak. Of the 4GB physical ram, I normally only have about 100MB free, and that is only with Mail, Safari, Skype and small utilities (that don't take up much more than 300MB in total). It seems that upgrading to 4GB didn't help at all.

The biggest problem comes in that in this limited situation, I now have to launch Adobe Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign for design projects. So basically I'm screwed. It constantly swops and I have about 190GB free HDD, so it's not that either.

So to run Adobe InDesign, I actually have to quit Mail, Safari and a few small utilities just to be able to work (of course then I can't get any e-mail, duh). This situation was primarily brought on by Snow Leopard, as everything used to run very well on Leopard.

Any ideas?

 

I know. I just quit Mail again this morning and it was at 80MB and now both the Virtual and Physical memory are over 300MB already... Ouch!

 

I think I found the problem. It's the WIDEMAIL plug-in. When I deleted that using the instructions on the website, and restarted Mail, it's now stable at only 70MB. Thanks Locodice, because you just made me question what was different.

I can live without WideMail until Leopard where it's built-in.