Speed Up Your Mail.app

The guru of all things Mail.app, Tim Gaden at Hawk Wings, has posted a tip that seems to offer a considerable speed boost to Mail. Basically performing the tip strips the "bloat out of [Mail's] Envelope index, an SQLite database Mail uses to store senders, recipients, subjects and so on." It requires a little bit of terminal jockeying, but this is limited to running one command using sqlite3. Tim himself reports considerable speed gains, as do many in the comments. As always, backing up before attempting such things seems like a good idea, but quite a few people have performed the trick without adverse results. Check it out for yourself over at Hawk Wings.

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

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The guru of all things Mail.app, Tim Gaden at Hawk Wings, has posted a tip that seems to offer a considerable speed boost to Mail....

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kakapo

WOW!!!
Not a VISTA whisper behind closed doors or ragged skirts but a real WOW!!!

My Mail is so fast now that there are skid marks on my screen from the speed. Alos to close - quit - is like lightening on steroids

Whew...

I used the single line command:
sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index vacuum

worked great...

Thanks everyone...
Best tip in a long time!

March 02 2007 at 7:26 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Brendan Sheehan jnr

Mail quits a lot faster, no lingering on before it quits after I press Command+Q... we'll see does that last?

March 02 2007 at 2:35 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

niclet

Wow! this is a precious tip.
I works with the one line version for me:
sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index vacuum subjects;

I tried also these:
sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index vacuum index;
sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index vacuum

I'm not sure what exactly is the fine differences between those three (compact subjects, the indexes or the whole db)... but the things is, it had a positive speed effect on Mail.

Do you know if there is any similar line command to speed up iCal now?

March 01 2007 at 10:51 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Mitch

This is a great tip.

It made a huge difference.

Thanks Tuaw!

Thanks Hawk Wings!

March 01 2007 at 10:31 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Catt

Thanks for pointing this tip out. My mail has been slow of late and I noticed the difference right away.

March 01 2007 at 9:04 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Hugin777

A single line in the Terminal will do the trick:
sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index vacuum

The argument to the vacuum command is ignored:
http://www.sqlite.org/lang_vacuum.html

March 01 2007 at 8:45 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

kirk

Wow. That really worked well!

March 01 2007 at 8:13 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

frank

wow, that's incredible. i think mail even loads in one dock bounce now. thanks for the tip!

March 01 2007 at 8:11 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

ryan

wow. Great tip! I only have 3 POP accounts and ~5000 messages, but this has visibly improved my Mail.app speed...I was startled the first time it loaded so fast.

March 01 2007 at 8:07 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Kevin

the command is taking forever on my 1.25ghtz g4...

i wonder how bloated my db was...

March 01 2007 at 7:50 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply