Speed Up Your Email
In this chapter I talk about some of the things that can make email much slower than it needs to be when accessed using desktop clients such as Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook, and how to address those issues. But be sure to also read the next chapter, Speed Up Your Network, which covers general network issues that could also have an effect on your email.
Adjust Checking Frequency
If you depend heavily on the timely receipt of email, you may have set your email client to check your IMAP or POP account as frequently as possible—say, once per minute. Paradoxically, such frequent checks can slow down your email client, in some cases increasing the amount of time it takes to receive new messages.
The reason is that each check takes time; the more accounts you have, and the more messages in each one, the greater that time is. If a single check takes longer than the interval you’ve designated between checks, the result is that your client is perpetually checking for messages. Depending on how your client is designed, this may mean that a series of checks are queued up such that checking your first account may have to wait until your client is finished checking several other, slower accounts; or it could mean that multiple checks are happening in parallel, which can slow down all of them.
In any case, my advice is simple: try a longer interval between checks—5, 10, or 15 minutes. See how that goes for a day or two; you can always adjust it again later. To change the frequency of email checks, do this:
Apple Mail: Go to Mail > Preferences > General and choose a frequency from the “Check for new messages” pop-up menu. (The default choice, Automatically, means the interval depends on whether your Mac is running on batteries or on AC power.)
Microsoft Outlook 2011: Go to Tools > Run Schedule > Edit Schedules. Double-click the Send & Receive All schedule, enter a time in the Repeating Schedule row, and click OK. Repeat with any additional schedules you may have.
Microsoft Outlook 2016 or later: Go to Tools > Accounts and select an account. Click Advanced, followed by Server. Make sure “Sync all IMAP folders every __ minutes” is selected, and change the number in the blank. Click OK. Repeat this for any additional accounts.
Mozilla Thunderbird: Go to Tools > Account Settings. Under any email account in the list on the left, select Server Settings. Change the number in “Check for new messages every __ minutes” and click OK. Repeat this for each of your accounts.
Consolidate Your Accounts
Your email client can check as many different accounts as you have—and many of us have quite a few! But you can speed up your email client and reduce email management hassles by consolidating your accounts so that your client has fewer servers to talk to (ideally only one). Of course, you may still need to receive mail from multiple addresses (say, a work address and a home address) and also send mail from multiple addresses (so that replies go to the right place). With a bit of effort, you can potentially do all this while still checking only one email account for incoming messages.
Receiving Email
If you have multiple personal POP or IMAP accounts, you can choose one as your primary account—that’s the one you’ll actively check with your email client—and then redirect email from your other (secondary) accounts to this primary account.
There are two ways to do so:
Set your secondary account(s) to forward all incoming mail to your primary account. (You can usually do this on your account’s Settings webpage; consult your email provider’s online help for details.)
Set the primary account to fetch mail from the secondary account(s) using POP (a feature commonly offered by larger email providers) or IMAP (much less common).
Either way, one account ends up with all the incoming mail sent to multiple addresses.
Before deciding which account will be your primary one, research the capabilities of your mail server. For example, some email providers let you fetch mail from a single external POP account—that is, an account from a different email provider. Gmail can check multiple POP accounts (and certain other accounts; see Get Gmail features for your other email accounts for details), and can do so automatically and continuously, making it a good choice to serve as a primary account.
Sending Email
The fact that you receive email from multiple accounts in a central location doesn’t automatically mean you can send mail from all those secondary accounts. Luckily, Gmail has a mechanism whereby you can authorize external addresses as valid From addresses. (If you use another provider, check to see if it offers a similar feature. If not, you might consider whether the benefits of switching to Gmail are worth the aggravation that inevitably comes with moving to a new email provider.)
Here’s how to set up this feature with Gmail (on the server side):
Log in to your Gmail account, click the gear
icon in the upper-right corner, and choose Settings from the pop-up menu.Click Accounts (or Accounts and Import).
In the “Send mail as” section, click the “Add another email address” link, and follow the instructions to enter and verify another address. For each address, you must enter your email provider’s SMTP server information (unless the address is for a Gmail account).
You can repeat these steps with as many addresses as needed.
Then you’ll need to set up your email client to use these multiple addresses. Apple Mail makes it easy; others make you jump through more hoops.
Apple Mail
Go to Mail > Preferences > Accounts and select the account that will serve as your main account. Then, from the Email Address pop-up menu, choose Edit Email Addresses. (In El Capitan or earlier, choose Edit Aliases from the Alias pop-up menu.) Click the plus 
button, type a full name and email address for an alias, and repeat as needed to add more aliases. Click OK when you’re done.
Each of these addresses then appears in the From pop-up menu in the New Message window.
Microsoft Outlook 2011 or Later
Outlook requires you to set up a new email account for each From address, but you can’t omit incoming server information. Do the following:
Choose Tools > Accounts.
From the Add
pop-up menu at the bottom of the window, choose E-mail (in Outlook 2011) or Other Email (in Outlook 2016).Enter your alternative email address and your password. The dialog expands to show more options. If “Configure automatically” is selected, deselect it.
Fill in the rest of your account details, exactly as you did for your primary account.
Click Add Account. You can then close the Accounts window.
If you’re using Outlook 2016 or later, you’re done. If you’re using Outlook 2011, continue with the following steps.
Choose Tools > Run Schedule > Edit Schedules.
Double-click Send & Receive All.
In the bottom (Action) portion of the window, look for the row—most likely the last one—that says Receive Mail from name of account you just added. Select that row and click Remove Action.
Click OK, and then close the Schedules window.
When you compose a new message, you can choose your alternative account from the From pop-up menu near the top of the window.
Mozilla Thunderbird
To set up an account in Thunderbird to send email from an alternative address, you must set up a new identity for each address. To do so, follow these steps:
Click Tools > Account Settings.
In the list on the left, select the account to which you want to add an address.
Click Manage Identities.
Click Add.
Enter your name and the alternative email address, and optionally a signature to go with that address. Click OK.
Click Close to close the Identities dialog, and click OK to close the Account Settings dialog.
To send email from the new address, choose it from the From pop-up menu near the top of the window when composing a new message.
Keep Your Inbox Trim
If you use IMAP to connect to your email provider with an email client such as Apple Mail, Outlook, or Thunderbird, you should be aware that from time to time, your client reviews and synchronizes all the messages in your Inbox—at least with the default settings (and I recommend keeping this feature turned on, to ensure that all your messages are always in sync between client and server).
Typically, this process happens when you open the app, and (depending on the client and your settings) perhaps periodically thereafter. With only a handful of messages in your Inbox, it might take only a second or two, but the more messages you have, the longer it will drag on (and the slower your client will be in the meantime).
The combination of IMAP and many (as in thousands or tens of thousands) of messages in your Inbox is a recipe for slowness, especially with Apple Mail. If you can reduce that number to, say, a few dozen—or even do what I do, which is to keep my Inbox as close to empty as I can—your email client will perform better.
Of course, your IMAP account could have other mailboxes besides your Inbox, and any of them could hold lots of messages. If your client is configured to keep all your mailboxes in sync with the server (as most are, by default), you may also experience delays when they sync. In most cases, your other mailboxes can sync in the background, and it won’t interfere with your work. But if you can’t read new mail in your Inbox for several minutes while your client syncs, that can be a serious productivity drain.
Apart from this technical issue, I personally find that an empty Inbox correlates strongly with efficiency and happiness. For practical advice on how to achieve the coveted “Inbox Zero” state and increase your email productivity, read my award-winning Macworld article Empty your Inbox. Many people have entirely different philosophies of handling email that don’t rely on keeping one’s Inbox empty. I can only tell you what works for me, and I can honestly say that my email is completely under control.
Optimize Your Rules or Filters
If you receive a great deal of email, you may have configured rules (or filters) to examine your incoming messages and automatically take some action—filing, deleting, or even replying to those that match criteria you specify. You can do this within your email client, and some email providers, including Gmail and iCloud, let you set server-based rules or filters that act on messages before they’re sent to your client (making them handy if you check email on an iPhone, iPad, or other mobile device whose email client lacks a filtering capability).
Rules can save you lots of time and effort, but if your rules are numerous or complex, they can sometimes slow down email checking. Here are a few tips to optimize your rules:
Server-based rules rule. The more filtering your server does, the less work there is for your email client to do—and that’s especially important when you’re using an iPhone, iPad, or other mobile device to check your mail, since email clients on those platforms typically lack rules of their own. So check with your email provider to see if it offers server-based rules, and if so, try to duplicate the functions of your client-based rules online—and then delete those rules from your client. Gmail and iCloud both offer server-based rules, although these rules have less power and flexibility than most client-based rules, so you may not be able to achieve 100% of your filtering online.
Use the “stop evaluating” action. Most email clients that offer rules have an option that means: if a message matches this rule, don’t bother checking any other rules. Sometimes you might want your rules to cascade, such that more than one rule could act on a given message, but if not (and trust me, most of the time you don’t want that), using this option can speed up processing a bit.
If you use Apple Mail, add a Stop Evaluating Rules action as the last action. In Thunderbird, the corresponding filter action is Stop Filter Execution. And in Outlook, make sure “Do not apply other rules to messages that meet these criteria” is selected (as it is by default).
Then order any rules or filters with this “stop evaluating” option before those without it.
Order more-likely matches first. Continuing the theme of the last point, the more rules there are that must evaluate a given message, the longer it takes. So try to arrange your rules in an order such that those that apply more frequently appear nearer the top of the list, and those that are less likely to produce a match appear later.
Rebuild Mailboxes or Database
Your email client may store the messages you’ve received in a single large database, or it may store them as individual files on disk. Even in the latter case, however, it likely uses a database to index message headers, and possibly other information, to facilitate searching and speed up display of message lists.
If something happens to make this database go out of sync with your (IMAP, iCloud, or Exchange) email server, you may not see all the right messages in one or more mailboxes. And, over time, the database can become cluttered with outdated or redundant information, or develop an increasingly inefficient structure. This can cause slow email behavior, especially when you try to list the contents of a mailbox or perform a search.
I’m at a loss to know why email clients don’t analyze their own databases from time to time and clean them up if they need cleaning up; the technology certainly exists. Until the developers of email clients get their acts together, though, you can rebuild the portion of your email database that refers to a particular mailbox if just one is giving you trouble, or rebuild the whole thing if need be. Either way, the procedure should be harmless, and although it may take several minutes or longer if you have a large number of messages, you’re likely to find your email client much more responsive afterward.
Rebuild a Mailbox
Here’s how to rebuild individual mailboxes in several common clients:
Apple Mail: Select one or more mailboxes in Mail’s sidebar. Choose Mailbox > Rebuild.
Microsoft Outlook: Right-click (or Control-click) a mailbox and choose Repair Message List (Outlook 2011) or Repair Folder (Outlook 2016 or later).
Mozilla Thunderbird:
Select a mailbox.
Go to Edit > Folder Properties > General Information.
Click Repair Folder. Wait for the repair to complete.
Click OK.
Rebuild Your Database
And here’s how to rebuild your entire database in the same clients:
Apple Mail:
Quit Mail.
In the Finder, navigate to
~/Library/Mail/Vx/MailData, whereVxvaries by operating system (Mojave:V6, High Sierra:V5; Sierra:V4; El Capitan:V3; Yosemite or Mavericks:V2).Drag the following three files to the Trash:
Envelope Index,Envelope Index-shm, andEnvelope Index-wal.
You can then relaunch Mail, and you should find that listing messages, as well as searching by header contents, is speedier.
Microsoft Outlook 2011:
Quit any Microsoft Office apps that are currently running.
Press and hold the Option key and open Outlook. The Microsoft Database Utility appears.
Select your identity (most users have only one) in the list, and then click Rebuild. The utility rebuilds your database, which may take anywhere from seconds to a half hour or longer, depending on its size.
When the rebuild is finished, click Done, and then choose Microsoft Database Utility > Quit.
You can now restart Outlook.
Mozilla Thunderbird:
Quit Mail.
Open Terminal (in
/Applications/Utilities).Enter the following (all on one line), and then press Return:
/usr/bin/sqlite3 ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/*.default/global-messages-db.sqlite vacuum
You can now relaunch Thunderbird.