I recently moved my 10+ years of Eudora email to Apple Mail.
The import worked well but I noticed that Apple Mail was really slow.
Thanks to Tim Gaden of Hawk Wings, it is now running much faster.
Essentially the following simple steps optimise the SQLite database (the “envelope index”) that Apple Mail uses to store indexes and subject lines of emails.
Here are the steps:
1. Quit Mail. Please BACKUP if you haven’t already.
2. Open Terminal (in Applications/Utilities).
3. Check your current ‘envelope archive’ size by entering this in the terminal:
ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index
4. Then enter the following:
sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum;
On my 2.75GB worth of email (not including attachments) this command took about 4 minutes on my MacBook Pro – don’t worry if it takes longer.
Then check your envelope size by running the first command again. My Envelope Index went from 155MB to 134MB and the performance improvement was surprisingly good.