I use Mac OS X Mail for all my email; work and home. Everything. I’m also very disorganised. The result is an Inbox with close-on 12000 messages in it, many with chunky attachments. This has a huge slowdown effect, not just on Mail itself, but on my Mac as a whole: each message is indexed by Spotlight, for example. So I decided that it was time to do something about it, and figured that, in the spirit of sharing, I’d document it here.

So, here are my top three tips for boosting Mac OS X Mail performance.

1. Get rid of attachments. Attachments that you need or want to keep should have been saved elsewhere by now. Chances are that if you haven’t saved them, you don’t need them. So its time to get rid. Starting with your Inbox, then going through each folder, select every message and go to the Message menu and select Remove attachments. This may take a while if you have as many messages as I do, so go and make a coffee.

2. Archive old messages to a webmail account. I use Gmail, which provides 2GB of storage per account. Set up an account especially for your Mail archive. Then go to Mail/Preferences. Select the Rules pane and select Add Rule. Write a description of your rule in the description window and set the rule to say ‘If any of these conditions are met: Date Received is Greater Than xx days old’ where xx is the number of days back you want to go to archive. eg to archive everything older than a year, xx should be 365. Then under Perform the Following Actions:’ select ‘Redirect Message to’ and in the box type your Gmail address.

3. Archiving to a webmail account is great, but you should also archive somewhere local. To do this go to the Library folder in your user folder and drag the Mail folder to an external hard disk. Now go back to the Rules pane and add an action to the rule created in 2. Select ‘Delete Message’ and click ok. Make sure the rule is ticked. Quit Mail and re-open it. The rule will run and from now on you’ll never have any messages older than the period you selected in the rule. Periodically archive your Mail folder to the hard disk you used in Step 3.

And if that’s not enough, here’s a bonus tip. Before opening Mail again after quitting, go to Library/Mail and drag the Envelope Index to your desktop. This will force MaIl to rebuild its index when you re-open it, which should speed it up a bit more.

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