Do you have any folders (junk mail, deleted mail, sent mail) that are simply enormous? Perhaps extensive mail rules are slowing it down (does Mail even support this feature?) I use Entourage myself, and I'm quite happy with it.

Did you do an upgrade from Panther to Tiger or a clean reinstall? The mail app in Tiger has some significant changes, and it might just be that the app didn't upgrade cleanly? I always have incredible problems doing OS upgrades - everything constantly takes minutes to open and eventually freezes on me. That's why I always do clean reinstalls.

Thanks so much. I got a new G4 and ended up "upgrading" because the 2 G4's "hung up" (always at the same place -- 21 min. to go!) during the "transfer data" process. But forget the new one & Tiger. It's doing it on my old G4/Panther, too. And it happened at one particular time and has been doing it ever since. I guess I could off-load past e-mails, delete irrelevant ones, then see if there is a "bad one" in the new small pile? But I don't know how to find the offender, really. I'm no geek. Anyway, thanks so much for trying. Rod

It could be a bad mail in the mix, but it could also be that your mailbox is too large. How large is it? Near 2GB? That's too large.

Thanks so much. It probably is that big. I'll offload a whole bunch of it and see what happens. But I think I have a bad e-mail. How does one find one of those? And thank you again!

There's no magical way to find a bad email. It's really just about trial and error.