Speed up Mail.app

This sqlite command speeds up Mail.app quite a bit:

http://www.hawkwings.net/2007/03/01/a-faster-way-to-speed-up-mailapp/

Worked great for me.

Great post karudzo. For any interest the command line to speed up mail is below. Apparently this command eliminates some bloat in how mail indexes. I must say, my Mail.pp was really slow to start-up, but now it is SMOKING FAST! Again, Great post!

sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum subjects;

Once you've done that....

CTRL+D

will end the session.

Will have to try it

I was thoroughly impressed... so much so that I QUIT Mail.app 4 times.. just to watch it open FAST.

FYI~ If you want to see exactly how much BLOAT is removed use this terminal command before, then after the "speed-up" command:

ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index

After pressing ENTER it will show the index Size. I cut my size in half.

By the way, this works in Leopard also. You can also run a second command against "body":

sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum subjects;
sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum body;

What does this do? What are you giving up when you do this?

Mail.app launches in about 2 seconds on my machine - how much faster do you need? Is everyone else experiencing slow launches?

Perhaps it slows down when it has a lot of mail in the folders? I don't use Mail.app much -> Thunderbird is my main mailer. Could this be the reason mine is so fast already?

RIDE said:

I was thoroughly impressed... so much so that I QUIT Mail.app 4 times.. just to watch it open FAST.

Click to expand...

That's an unfair statement, my square-stated friend. Any app relaunched is super fast since it's still in ram as inactive memory. So when you relaunch, that block of ram becomes active again. No disk access.
To prove the point, launch photoshop. Quit photoshop. Launch photoshop. The second launch should be under 5 seconds easily.

All it does is clean up the sqlite index for whatever it's run against (subject, body or whatever).