Searching in Mail is slow

I've just upgraded to mac os 10.4.3 on my powerbook G5 and I'm using Mail.app 2.0.5 for the first time. I've read a lot on this forum about how the application is slow in importing mail especially from an IMAP account (which is what I have). I was wondering if anyone has noticed that the search feature is also EXTREMELY SLOW. I'm only searching my inbox in either the subject or entire message, but it's taking minutes if not tens of minutes to search those fields. Search in the To and From are quite fast. In comparison the search in Mail 1.3.9 was nearly instantaneous, which was why I switched to mail in the first place. Is this a temporary affliction until Mail 2.0.5 indexes the messages? I assumed it did this when it took 4 hours to import my mailboxes but apparently not. Thanks in advance for your help.

Guys I might have a fix for you.
If you locate your Mail folder inside your User Account Library you will find a document called "Envelope Index" - it could be quite a large file.
Quit out of Mail
Move the Envelope Index file to the desktop (don't delete in case something goes wrong) and then re-open Mail again. It will start to build a new index. Depending on how much email you are storing and how large the previous index file was will decide how long this re-build takes. You will notice that comparing the two files shows that the new file can be much much smaller. Also I hope this makes thing run a lot faster too. Doing this periodically does no harm and don't be freaked out about how many emails it is indexing. It can take quite some time depending on how much you have.
Hope this helps.
Gerry.

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