Mac Mail 50K emails: Too Many?

I have an older PowerPC iMac with OS 10.5.8. I have accumulated some 50 thousand emails in the "All Mail" folder. Would having this many in that folder effect the speed of the application? It's acting sluggish. I've tried to delete them all-at-once but the computer just processes with the little wheel spinning and spinning ad infinitum.

Questions: Does that many emails slow down the app sufficient to be a problem?
How do I delete them all if their existence IS a problem?

Thank you!

I think you kinda know the answer to your question and that's a bonafide yes. Doing ANYTHING on 50k messages a group will bring virtually any machine to a halt. On my i7 iMac with 12GB of memory, selecting about 2500 messages to mark them all as read in one shot gives me a temporary beachball..I can only imagine was 50k would do.

You might not be able to delete them all at once from within Mac Mail..you can however delete them a few 100 at a time..

Going forward you might want to spend a little bit of time creating some folders and rules to sort your mail into appropriate folders..

Use the Export/Archive Mailbox function it works great.

DavidH

I appreciate the help from you both. Ashwyn, even deleting a 100 or so at a time isn't working because the total of emails in the "All Mail" box now reads "66,892 messages" AFTER I have deleted 10's of thousands. I spent the better part of the day yesterday deleting and deleting, rebooting the computer, re-opening the mail program.

Is there no folder I can actually look at that has all the mail in it? It says that the email is on the server. Where is the server? On the computer? In the server at some other location? And why would it be that the mail is not in a folder to begin with?

I am a guy who's owned one Mac after another over the past 20+ years and I still don't know much. I can't visualize the inner workings because it's just electronics...in other words, magic.

DavidH: what does the export/archive mailbox function do?

Now the Mail program is not responding

Mac Mail is in some sort of trouble now and will not respond. I have to Force Quit the program altogether now and can't seem to do anything.

Rebooting the iMac seems not to be helping.

Who is your email provider? That's where the server is. For example: My email provider is Google (GMail) therefore, I can access its server direct from their web address. Whether or not deleting mail from there is going to help, I don't know since the mail is located on your machine.

Hi and thanks. To answer your question, I use google also and come to think of it, my "All Mail" box is under the Gmail chain of folders. So I guess if all the mail there is backup only, I don't need to worry about it and need to look above in that window, to where the folder on MY computer holds the mail that would slow my iMac down. I'm beginning to realize that this is the reason I was having such a tough time deleting the mail in the google server! And that's not the mail that is slowing me down...

That really helps me visualize the contents of the boxes. Thank you so much!

I wonder why no one advised me to check where my mail really IS...which is why I had such a hard time with this! If 90% of my mail was at a server in California (or here in the Seattle area) then it should not have been such a source for worry for me!