Speed Up Apple Mail
Lately, I’ve been noticing that my email was being very sluggish and it seemed to take forever to move from one email message or inbox to another. I was getting frustrated because I do much of my work in Mail and performance like that not only slows me down, but each time I saw that spinning beach ball, I wanted to go out for a cup of coffee (or abandon my computer for my iPad).
So, I did a little research and with the size of my mailboxes and number of messages I have, my index file had grown to be quite large and needed to be rebuilt. There are terminal commands that will do this for you, but what worked for me was the following:
- Find the index file
- Drag it to the desktop (which forces Mail to make a new one)
Sounds pretty easy, right? Well, Apple in its wisdom decided to hide the Library folder within your user account in Lion, so finding that index file can be a bit tricky.
There are two options to expose your Library: temporarily and permanently. The easiest way to do that temporarily is to hold down the ‘Option’ key in Finder and select ‘Library’ from the ‘Go’ menu. To permanently expose the library, you need to launch Terminal and enter the following command to show or hide the directory:
chflags nohidden ~/Library/
The users’ Library folder will immediately become visible. (Reverting this back to the standard Lion invisible setting is simple, too: chflags hidden ~/Library)
Once you have made the Library directory available, quit Mail and go into the ‘Mail’ folder, find the ‘MailData’ folder and then drag the ‘Envelope Index’ file to your desktop. Then, simply launch Mail and it will tell you you need to “import” your messages. In the process, it creates a new ‘Envelope Index’ file in your Library.
My index went from over 250MB to under 75MB and now Mail works speedily again; no more beach balls and no more frustration!