My Mail isn't working!

I'm not sure if this is the correct spot to be posting this question or not (sorry, I'm new here), but.... my mail has all of a sudden decided not to work. I can open mail (it takes forever to load up), but it seems to make my computer (iBookG4) run slower with it open. Never used to happen. The big problem is that it's not letting me delete mail (I think that's why it's taking a while to load because it's indexing all the old mail). When I have it open I'll delete the mail I've read, delete sent mail, empty the trash, etc. but the next time I try and open it everything is back. I have account for optonline and AOL coming through my mac mail. In the past few days I've taken to simply going to the respective web pages to retrieve my mail instead of trying to open the mail application. However, I miss having mail coming right to me and seeing the little red dot so I instantly know. Anyone have an idea what went wrong?
Thanks

There is a good solution for this --

The inbox is a pretty unstable place-- mail coming in and all -

What you do is create folders and archive old mail there on your Mac hardrive --dont keep old messages in your Inbox.

In Thunderbird, mail gets corrupted that well, and generally email clients get slower and less stable .

Just create folders and move messages there ( or better create filters, which I do, to automatically forward incoming mail to folders), that way your inbox is small and stable, and more organized.

rsunusi said:

There is a good solution for this --

The inbox is a pretty unstable place-- mail coming in and all -

What you do is create folders and archive old mail there on your Mac hardrive --dont keep old messages in your Inbox.

Click to expand...

That's the thing..... I don't keep old mail in my inbox. I usually keep my mail very neat and clean. Maybe I have 10 messages max in my inbox at a time. I also regularly delete my sent mail and empty the trash bin. Just all of a sudden mail won't let me delete my mail. I try and delete mail I've read and it just comes back the next time I open the application. The same goes for sent mail and trashed mail. It won't go away!