HELP: My mail program is running at a snail's pace...

Question

My Mail program has slowed to a crawl. Everything else on my computer is running fine, but even with nothing else running, every single function takes forever. Things that should be instantaneous (selecting text, positioning the cursor, changing font, etc.) takes several minutes. It's almost unusable.
I've looked online, and followed the instructions:
(from: http://danwarne.com/is-apple-mail-running-slow-speed-it-up/)
"You can check your current 'envelope archive' size by entering this in the terminal:
ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index
Then to optimise it (cleans out stuff that has been marked for deletion but not actually deleted, defragments the structure, etc):
sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum;
Then check your envelope archive size again to see the results…
ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index
It compacted my envelope archive down from 55MB to 50MB — not a huge increase, but the speed difference was dramatic.
In particular, my 'sent mail' folder which had been taking 10 – 15 seconds to open (8,000 items) now only takes two or three seconds."
That didn't work, so I tried this:
(from: http://www.macworld.com/article/56673/2007/03/mailfix.html)
"The Brute Force solution
This solution forces Mail to build a completely new Envelope Index from scratch. It’s not my preferred solution, but it will ensure that you’re starting with a completely clean index file.
Quit Mail, and in the Finder, navigate to your user’s Libary -> Mail folder, and then move the file named Envelope Index out to the desktop. When you relaunch Mail, it will tell you it needs to import your messages. Click Continue and then just wait—it took about a minute to import 9,900 messages on my MacBook Pro. When the import is done, you should be looking at Mail just as it was before—but with any luck it will be running more quickly, and any odd message-related issues you were having should be resolved."
That didn't work either.
I check my Activity Monitor and have at least 80% of my cpu idle, and about 960 mb free system memory, so there doesn't seem to be anything hogging up the processors.
My livelihood is dependent upon access to email. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know ASAP.
Thanks very much!
TRUE
TRUE(at)TRUEart(dot)biz

Answer 1

My Mail program has slowed to a crawl. Everything else on my computer is running fine, but even with nothing else running, every single function takes forever. Things that should be instantaneous (selecting text, positioning the cursor, changing font, etc.) takes several minutes. It's almost unusable.
I've looked online, and followed the instructions:
(from: http://danwarne.com/is-apple-mail-running-slow-speed-it-up/)
"You can check your current 'envelope archive' size by entering this in the terminal:
ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index
Then to optimise it (cleans out stuff that has been marked for deletion but not actually deleted, defragments the structure, etc):
sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum;
Then check your envelope archive size again to see the results…
ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index
It compacted my envelope archive down from 55MB to 50MB — not a huge increase, but the speed difference was dramatic.
In particular, my 'sent mail' folder which had been taking 10 – 15 seconds to open (8,000 items) now only takes two or three seconds."
That didn't work, so I tried this:
(from: http://www.macworld.com/article/56673/2007/03/mailfix.html)
"The Brute Force solution
This solution forces Mail to build a completely new Envelope Index from scratch. It’s not my preferred solution, but it will ensure that you’re starting with a completely clean index file.
Quit Mail, and in the Finder, navigate to your user’s Libary -> Mail folder, and then move the file named Envelope Index out to the desktop. When you relaunch Mail, it will tell you it needs to import your messages. Click Continue and then just wait—it took about a minute to import 9,900 messages on my MacBook Pro. When the import is done, you should be looking at Mail just as it was before—but with any luck it will be running more quickly, and any odd message-related issues you were having should be resolved."
That didn't work either.
I check my Activity Monitor and have at least 80% of my cpu idle, and about 960 mb free system memory, so there doesn't seem to be anything hogging up the processors.
My livelihood is dependent upon access to email. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know ASAP.
Thanks very much!
TRUE
TRUE(at)TRUEart(dot)biz