Member Avatar for gnesio

My Apple Mail program now takes minutes to open -- latest Panther, Tiger, too. Says it is indexing the last 200 e-mails or so, then takes 3 more minutes to save. Every time. I figured I've somehow screwed up its index, tried Disk Warrior -- Nope. Any ideas to force it back to health? Thanks.
gnesio

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Dani AI

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Short expert summary and a safe plan to try before deeper surgery.

This looks like a classic Mail index or mailbox-size problem rather than a drive-directory issue (so DiskWarrior would not usually fix it). Quick triage: quit Mail, relaunch it while holding Shift (prevents Mail from auto‑selecting mailboxes), temporarily disable any Mail rules, and empty Junk/Trash on the server. Check mailbox sizes by Control‑clicking a mailbox and choosing “Get Account Info” so you can see which account/mailbox is very large. These quick steps will tell you whether the issue is local (per‑user index) or tied to a huge mailbox. (appletoolbox.com)

If that points to index corruption or slow indexing, do a safe rebuild of Mail’s index (make a copy first): quit Mail, back up ~/Library/Mail (use Finder or ditto), then remove (or move to Desktop) the Envelope Index files from the MailData folder for your Mail version — Mail will rebuild them when it restarts. Alternatively use Mailbox → Rebuild on a single mailbox to keep changes smaller. Expect reimporting to take time; don’t permanently delete backups until Mail behaves. A manual Spotlight reindex can help if Mail remains “Indexing…”. (c-command.com)

If the mailbox is huge, archive old messages in small batches rather than dumping everything at once: create a local mailbox (Mailbox → New Mailbox → On My Mac), move a year’s worth of messages into it, then test Mail. Repeat with smaller batches (binary-split the mailbox) to isolate any corrupt message: move half the messages — if Mail still chokes, move half of that half, etc., until you find the offending group. To find big on‑disk mail folders quickly, run:

du -sk ~/Library/Mail/* | sort -n | tail -n 10

Use Mail’s Export/Import only after testing in small chunks. Back up before each destructive step and only empty Trash after confirming success. (support.apple.com)

Notes tied to the thread: tried DiskWarrior (useful for directory problems but not Mail’s envelope index), was correct to suspect mailbox bloat, and ’s upgrade suspicion is sensible — a fresh user account or Safe Boot can confirm whether the problem is per‑user Mail data or system‑wide.

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Member Avatar for Dani

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.

Member Avatar for gnesio

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

Member Avatar for yellow

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.

Member Avatar for gnesio

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!

Member Avatar for yellow

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

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