Mail Running SLOW!

Question

Lately, Mail is slow slow slow. When I click on 'get mail', the wheel spins and spins. Eventually one of these things happens:
-I get a message saying I'm 'offline'
-I get a message saying something can't connect to some sort of smtp server
-it spins forever and Ihave to restart the application
Also, when I try to send mail, often the mail find itself in the Outbox, where it sits and sits and sits, until it finally sends after several minutes.
I have a cable modem connected directly to the computer.
I never had these problems with Outlook.
Any advice?

Answer 1

Do you have other mail accounts in addition to Gmail? Does the same problem happen with the other accounts as well?
Verify/repair the startup disk (not just permissions), as described here:
The Repair functions of Disk Utility: what's it all about?
In Mail, open Window > Activity Viewer. What do you see Mail doing there while it spins forever?
Do you have any Mail plug-ins or system utilities that could interfere with Mail? In the Finder, go to each of the following folders (if they exist). What do you see there?
/Library/StartupItems/
/Library/LaunchDaemons/
/Library/LaunchAgents/
/Library/InputManagers/
/Library/Mail/Bundles/
~/Library/LaunchAgents/
~/Library/InputManagers/
~/Library/Mail/Bundles/
To make accurately reporting this information easier, you may open /Applications/Utilities/Terminal, type the following command (you can just copy it here and paste it in Terminal), and press <Return>. You can then copy the output of that command from Terminal and paste it in your reply to this post:
ls -1 /Library/StartupItems /Library/LaunchDaemons /Library/LaunchAgents /Library/InputManagers /Library/Mail/Bundles ~/Library/LaunchAgents ~/Library/InputManagers ~/Library/Mail/Bundles
Note: For those not familiarized with the ~/ notation, it refers to the user’s home folder. You can easily locate any of the folders referred to in this post by copying the folder path here, doing Go > Go to Folder in the Finder, and pasting the folder path there.