Mail freezes when updating large RSS feed boxes

Question

This is something I encountered and how I have formulated a work around. I have discovered that Mail will freeze when updating large RSS feed boxes.
A little history. After discovery RSS and how they work, I began building a collection of feeds. They included feeds from many major news providers. Over the years, the number articles form some of these sources went into the thousands.
As my database of articles grew, I encountered more severe and more frequent freezes of the application Mail. I began to take the computer off-line in order to work in these files. But inevitably, a situation would arise that would lead to the Mail application freezing.
Isolation of the issue with Mail and to the RSS boxes within Mail. The freeze would not occur when RSS feeds boxes where collapsed. Also, the freeze only affected the Mail application. Mac OS was not affected and I was able to alway close Mail from with in the Force Quit menu. Also, the Force Quit menu affirmed that Mail was indeed frozen by listing it as also "not responding."
Work around. To resolve this issue, I first choose to remove the number of RSS feed that I had subscribed to but used very infrequently. Second, I choose to delete old feeds from "never" to "every two weeks" from within the Mail preference menu (RSS sub-menu).
I think it took a while for Mail to fully delete messages older than two weeks. In fact, when I began deleting whole feeds, it took some time for those feeds to be removed from my mail box tree. Within the Activity Monitor application, I could see that a lot of disk use was occurring, even though the OS was allowing me to continue to use Mail and other applications.
To assist this process, I took my computer off-line and stepped away from it. Upon my return, the disk use was down to normal, the number of article in many RSS boxes where greatly reduced, and my disk had recovered over a GB of space. Also, Mail seems to be behaving properly, with smooth and quick performance.
If you found this article, I hope the information provided has been helpful! After a quick search in to previous posts, an entirely similar post was not found. However, others are finding the Mail application will freeze, but not necessary for the same reason.

Answer 1

Since I don't want to download any attachments from RSS feeds in Mail.app, is there any way to turn off the attachment download once and for all? I also get the beach ball for minutes when an item has a big attachment, and I fear my HD is cluttered with files I don't use.