Filed under: iLife, Tips and tricks, Odds and ends
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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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Sebastian Holmqvist said 7:40PM on 3-01-2007
Wow, the difference is incredible. From sluggish to "swooosh" :)
Didn't write down the size difference, but it's a hell of a lot faster, that's for sure!
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Jameson said 7:55PM on 3-01-2007
I'm a n00b to the terminal. When I run the command I get SQL error: unrecognized token: "\", and it doesn't do anything. Any ideas?
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ryanlegg said 8:07PM on 3-01-2007
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.
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franko said 8:11PM on 3-01-2007
wow, that's incredible. i think mail even loads in one dock bounce now. thanks for the tip!
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kirk said 8:17PM on 3-01-2007
Wow. That really worked well!
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Hugin777 said 8:56PM on 3-01-2007
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
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Catt said 9:04PM on 3-01-2007
Thanks for pointing this tip out. My mail has been slow of late and I noticed the difference right away.
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Kevin S. said 9:36PM on 3-01-2007
the command is taking forever on my 1.25ghtz g4...
i wonder how bloated my db was...
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Mitch said 10:31PM on 3-01-2007
This is a great tip.
It made a huge difference.
Thanks Tuaw!
Thanks Hawk Wings!
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niclet said 10:52PM on 3-01-2007
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?
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brendan Sheehan jnr said 2:35AM on 3-02-2007
Mail quits a lot faster, no lingering on before it quits after I press Command+Q... we'll see does that last?
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kakapo said 7:26AM on 3-02-2007
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!
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