January 14, 2008

Mail.app and Gmail performance boost

So I’m loving that Gmail finally got IMAP as a feature.

It makes the iPhone expe­ri­ence soooo much better and it is nice to be able to read my mail in a desk­top app at work and at home.

How­ever, I noticed that Mail.app and Gmail were not get­ting along so well. Mail.app’s activ­ity viewer would con­stantly show it syn­croniz­ing, updat­ing, down­load­ing or doing var­i­ous other net­work activ­i­ties that made it decid­edly not cool.

I tried Thun­der­bird for a while, and it had great performance.

I wanted to switch back to Mail.app, though, as I got an iPhone for Christ­mas (sweet­ness), and I wanted to use the pretty sweet plat­form of Mail.app/Address Book/iCal + iPhone.

Long story short… the secret is to not let Mail.app down­load and store your mes­sages from Gmail. With my 1.8 GB of mail it. Takes. A. While. To. Download.

Secret sauce is to go: Mail -> Pref­er­ences -> Accounts -> Advanced and set “Keep copies of my mes­sages for offline viewing” to “Don’t keep copies of any messages.”

Make Gmail and Mail.app love each other

The only down­side that I can see is that you can’t search your mail very well from within Mail.app or Spot­light. But, uh, that’s what Gmail is for!

Filed under: Technology

Next:
Previous:

Related