Gmail really slow on Mac OS Mail

Question

Hey all,
I've recently been experiencing slow performance in both receiving time in emails as well as viewing HTML based emails.  I know that Gmail recently stopped supporting push mail, and that on iDevices we're back to 15 minute delays in fetching emails, but I have my fetch set to every 1 minute in Mail, but I get pretty serious delays in emails coming into my inbox.  Sometimes lasting as long as 3 minutes.
Also I'm running into slow viewing of HTML based emails.  I will click on an unread message and it will sit and chug and chug with a blank screen for up to 3-5 minutes.
I've employed the database refresh terminal command hoping it would clean up some messy database goo, but that didn't help any at all.  It seems it's specific to my gmail accounts.  My icloud account seems to be working ok.
I've also noticed that Safari on my machine sometimes lags in loading pages in the same way Mail does.  When I open Chrome, I don't run into the same issues.  Could this be an issue with Safari on my machine, and doesn't Mail use the Safari engine to render HTML emails?
Any suggestions on how I can either fix or workaround these issues?

Answer 1

Have you tried emptying the Safari cache lately? Press Command + Option + E. Quit and relaunch Safari to test.
If that didn't help, open a Finder window. From the Finder menu bar click Go > Go to Folder
Type or copy paste the following:
~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Cache.db
Click Go then move the Cache.db file to the Trash.
Quit and relaunch Safari to test again.
doesn't Mail use the Safari engine to render HTML emails?
Yes.