Site icon Scott Loftesness

Smart Folders and Mail.app Performance

One of the things that had been bugging me since my upgrade to Leopard on my MacBook Pro had been general performance – something I couldn’t figure out.

Last night, I noticed that the many smart mailboxes I had set up in Mail.app a long time ago (and never bothered to actually use!) had thousands of emails in them. Using the Activity Viewer in Mail, I noticed that a lot of time was being spent after retrieving my mail (every minute!) updating the smart mailboxes.

So, I ended up just deleting those smart mailboxes – one by one – and now things are much snappier – and I’m much happier! I suppose I could have also backed off the mail check frequency a bit and had the same effect. Smart mailboxes are great tools – but if you’re not using them, you might enjoy shedding their baggage.

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