Using 3GB of RAM with only Mail open?

Question

Hi
I recently seemed to be having some slowness on my iMac 27" running Mountain Lion.
I installed an app that monitors the RAM usage in the menu bar, and after switching on this morning, and only starting Mail, it seemed to be using 3GBs of RAM.
That seems really excessive to me, for one app!!
Can anyone give some advise to see if there is a problem, or to resolve this issue?
Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Rob, open the Activity Monitor, select "All processes" and sort them by Real Mem. This can help you identify the real cause - for instance, it may be the app you've recently installed which runs in background.
After that, open System Preferences - Users and Groups - Login Items and disable those you don't need or don't know about.
On my Mac, Mail consumes about 110Mb with 5 connected accounts. If you have much more significant consumption, consider cleaning Mail settings and data (in Terminal, run rm -rf ~/Library/Mail), but make sure you have all your mail stored on server. Then you may have to set up your accounts again.
And don't forget to keep you Mac up to date - sometimes Apple fixes memory leaks in its apps.