Speed Up Mail In OS X

Cory over at BoingBoing writes:

The Mail.app fan-site Hawk Wings has a great tip for Mail.app users — a simple command that many are swearing by as a means of evincing a gigantic speedup in Mail.app’s performance. If you’re suffering through the same hell I lived with back in my PowerBook days, you might give it a shot.

Apparantly, Mail.app uses sqlite for it’s mail databases. In order to make normal, day-to-day inserting and deleting of mail items speedy, these typical transactions don’t force the database file to go through an optimization process. Over time, however, the mail database can end up fragmented and can be sped up quite a bit by reclaiming unused space and cleaning up the database structure. Here’s how you can do this with the Mail database:

1. Quit Mail.
2. Open Terminal.
3. Type the following:
   cd ~/Library/Mail
sqlite3 Envelope Index
An sqlite> prompt will appear.
At that prompt, type vacuum subjects;.
After a short delay, the prompt will return. Type Control-D to exit.
4. Restart Mail and enjoy the extra speed.

Scripts to automate the Mail.app Envelope speed trick – [via] Link.

Related:

• SQLite
• SQLite VACUUM command