On Sunday I asked on Twitter;Â ”Anyone else use Gmail IMAP in Mail.app with over 25,000 items? Does Mail.app seem to crawl for you too?”.
The responses were a mixed bag. Some told me to ditch Mail.app, some said that they’d rather use POP3 instead of IMAP, and others with far less email messages than I have sympathized with my situation.
Today while starting up the Macbook and sipping my coffee, I noticed Apple released Mac OS X 10.5.5 as a free software update. Â In the change notes I took notice of this particular line.
“Addresses performance issues related to displaying IMAP messages.”
To be honest, I don’t know what this actually means. It could mean that it speeds up Mail.app’s ability to display IMAP messages with in-line attachments. Â But it doesn’t say that. Â It could mean that it speeds up Mail.app’s message list, which is what I want it to say, but it doesn’t say that either.
After updating to 10.5.5 this morning I gave Mail.app a whirl. Â After several “restarts” of Mail.app it seems to be a little slower than it was before at displaying the message list. Â It takes 33-seconds to load the list on an IMAP-powered Mailbox with 11,899 messages.
So while the above update is, I’m sure, an update to Mail.app with regards to IMAP performance. I’m not seeing it yet. Â It looks like I’ll either switch to a web-based client for my Gmail-for-domains powered email (especially now that Gears runs in Safari) or somehow keep 1,000 messages in my Inbox at a time.
Suggestions?
I saw your tweet about Fluid App + gReader. Have you tried making an SSB with Gmail? It actually works great, and I haven’t even tried it with gears yet!
That, or wait until Google makes Chrome for the Mac available.
I’m using mail.app with Gmail POP3 with quite a few rules to keep things sorted. It doesn’t give me access to all 2+GB of email in my inbox, but I’m almost always online and rarely need to dig anything out that I don’t already have on my desktop.
But, if I should, it’s nice to know I can.
db: Prior to Gears’ release I did try to use Fluid and create a SSB for Gmail. It didn’t take. But I’m probably going to revisit this in the near future.