I recently updated, and expected to see the customary procedure of reenabling the SpamSieve rule. However I’m noticing after the update that:
Mail is very slow to load. Extended beach ball period on my fairly modern iMac.
If I quit mail and restart, the the plugin not loaded warning for SpamSieve appears again.
I’ve gone through the plugin troubleshoot page, and also the “runs slow” page. No changes are seen.
As it stands, mail and SpamSieve appear to be running correctly however I’m unable to quit mail without going through another set of delays and plugin activation.
I’m on Big Sur 11.6, Running 24GB memory with a 3.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 .
Do you see the SpamSieve commands in Mail’s Message menu? Does Mail launch quickly if you disable all plug-ins from the General tab of its preferences? Also, it would be good to record a sample of Mail during the beachball.
Hi Michael. Yes, SpamSieve commands are visible when the plugin was active. I went through a couple of cycles of deactivating/reactivating the plugin and rule and now the Mail app seems to start up quite briskly. However I noticed a couple of things, which I’m not sure are normal:
SpamSieve app does start up, even if both the rule and plugin are deactivated.
2.The beach ball still appears for about 30 seconds when I try to open Mail preferences. This only happens the first time I open preferences after Mail is opened. Subsequent attempts to open preferences are quite speedy.
Here’s my best effort at sampling Mail and SpamSieve during the prolonged preferences opening process
It sounds like the SpamSieve-related stuff is working normally.
Thanks for sending the sample reports. It looks like the main reason that Mail is hanging, at least during this sample, is that it’s doing a search of your Contacts database. I’m not sure why Mail needs to do this. About how many contacts do you have? Which tab of the Preferences is selected?
Hmm, I’ve been having a lot of trouble with my contacts database on the Mac. Lots of lagging. Problems adding new contacts on the Mac. A phone call to Apple instructed me to “remove duplicates” which helped matters only briefly. Strangely the iPhone seems to be fine with the contact list, so I’m guessing the problem is local to the Mac. Would you know of any method to “rehab” Contacts app on the Mac? To answer your question:
My contact database is rather large, 7600 cards accumulated over many years as a Mac user. Many are duplicates or no longer current. I believe Mail preferences opens to the “general” tab during the delay.
You can use the Contacts app to export a Contacts Archive. After doing that, it might help to quit all your apps, delete the folder /Users/<username/Library/Application Support/AddressBook, and then restart. Hopefully, it will then sync everything from iCloud and build a new database. If not, you could tell it to import the archive.
Michael, thank you! That was excellent advice. My contacts app is working better than it has in ages. SpamSieve is working smoothly, mail is starting right up and there’s only a minor delay when opening preferences. Probably normal. Much appreciation for your fine products and support. ~Bill A.