Hmmm... I haven't found any options labelled 'compact', although there are some called 'rebuild'. --- After playing around with the MacOS 'Mail' app for a while on my wife's Mac, here are my current speculations: * It appears that the 'Mail' program continuously tries to interpret html mail -- including any embedded Javascript -- presumably to check for spam and/or perform indexing * MacOS Javascript is incredibly slow -- e.g., Apple's own Safari browser * It used to be possible to disable indexing in 'Mail', but now with Time Machine, this appears to be no longer possible. It may be possible to disable *both* Time Machine and indexing, but at the cost of no backup for 'Mail' at all! * My wife was keeping lots of deleted mail in the 'Trash' folder, but for some reason, these emails were being continuously re-interpreted -- including their html/javascript code -- so 'Mail' slowed to a San Andreas Fault pace. I was able to speed up 'Mail' to some extent by *keeping the 'Trash' folder always empty*, and utilizing another folder 'myoldtrash' instead. Thus, whatever special treatment 'Trash' was getting no longer stands in the way of performance. Unfortunately, keeping 'Trash' completely empty takes a lot of additional effort to constantly check its contents, and to immediately decide whether to delete it forever or move it to 'myoldtrash'. I'd love to figure out how to disable Spotlight indexing w/o disabling Time Machine; the problem may be that this MacOS is using the latest 'Catalina', so all of the old advice (after Googling) about how this might be done no longer applies. At 12:15 PM 6/1/2020, Andres Valloud wrote:
There's even an option to compact automatically if it's worth it.
On 6/1/20 06:39, Joerg Arndt wrote:
First do what is suggested below. Then try to find find something like "compact folders" in the menu and do that right away! In addition when your mails are via IMAP and hold on a server, the server may be a bottleneck. Also don't poll for new messages excessively, every 5 minutes should be enough. You can always manually request new messages in the (rare, I guess) cases when you expect to receive a new message "right now". Best regards, jj P.S.: After about three decades of not using Windows I now use a borrowed Win10 Machine (for "Teams" for remote teaching). What a bloddy horror this O/S and software is! * Andres Valloud <ten@smallinteger.com> [Jun 01. 2020 15:12]:
Re: email performance, you may look into folder size. It seems many email clients these days like to load the entire index of folders into memory, and that the complexity associated with that has been kept linear or worse. For that reason, it may help to periodically move older emails to archive folders that a) don't change anymore (note how doing this will *substantially* cut down the size of your time machine backups), and b) presumably you don't open often and so the email client isn't tempted to load all the index into memory again. These tips help when using Thunderbird. HTH...
On 5/31/20 10:42, Henry Baker wrote:
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