After updating SpamSieve to 2.4.49 (M1 Macbook Air) the initial start of Mail takes approx. 20-40 seconds, Spamsieve & mail is not responding during this period. After that it works, until I exit mail and restart, same behavior.
A slow launch of Mail is usually caused by a Mail/macOS issue where the file system is bogged down and Mail waits a long time for it before it begins loading its plug-ins. To work around this:
- Go to the Rules tab of Mail’s Preferences and uncheck the SpamSieve rule.
- Go to the General tab of Mail’s Preferences and click on Manage Plug-ins…. Uncheck SpamSieve.mailbundle and restart Mail.
- Go back to Manage Plug-ins… and check SpamSieve.mailbundle. Now restart Mail again.
- Go to the Rules tab of Mail’s Preferences and check the SpamSieve rule to make it active again.
Thank you for the quick reply, I tried:
1 (uncheck Rule) - ok
2 (Uncheck Plugin) - mail window (Settings, general) disappeared immediately, still in taskbar “not responding”, did wait a minute, killed mail then.
3 (restart and reactivate) - Restart again quick, reactivated plugin, restart takes 40 secs again.
4 I did not bother to try.
What I recognized Starting Mail w/o plugin active, jumping starts immediately, starting with active plugin just one jump in taskbar, then I have to wait.
Unfortunately no progress - any other ideas?
It sounds like there’s either a Mail bug or something wrong with Mail’s files on your Mac if it gets stuck when disabling a plug-in. I would try resetting its plug-ins folder.
Wow, thanks for this - after resetting the plugin-folder works smooth again - What a support!!! 
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Hi Michael, I’ve been doing this fix of “slow starting Apple Mail” by disabling the SpamSieve plugin, shutting down and restarting mail, then re-enabling the plugin for quite a long time now (years)… It certainly fixes the slow mail launch but only for a short time, days, and then it’s back to slow loading and the need to go do this procedure again… Any chance this is ever going to be fixed in Apple Mail or is there some other work around so I don’t need to do this procedure every few days??? Or just live with Mail taking maybe a good 30 seconds or so to load??? thanks…
I’ve not heard back from Apple about this bug, but long-term they are switching from plug-ins to extensions, which should eliminate the problem.
For now, the workaround should continue to work, though it’s not clear to me why for most people it lasts for months or a year but for a few like you it gets slow again after just days. Just out of curiosity, do you have Time Machine enabled on your Mac?
Hi Michael… No, I do NOT have Time Machine enabled… I use an online backup service but I do NOT backup Mail even to that service as mail, as I’m sure you know, is one huge, multi-GByte file that would need to get backed up every time I change a single bit… Instead, I clone my entire Mac hard drive every couple weeks and that’s how I backup Mail…
And I don’t completely power down my Mac very often although I do log off maybe once a day or so, which of course means I restart Mail when I log back on… Was running macOS Monterey (12.x) but just recently upgraded to macOS Ventura, 13.1…
Apple Mail is pretty Time Machine–friendly. It does not store multi-GB files. There is one (or sometimes more) small file per message, plus a database index file that’s excluded from backups.
My hypothesis is that the slowness at launch is related to not using Time Machine. I don’t think it matters how much you back up, just that having Time Machine running does some maintenance that happens to speed up something that Mail does during launch. So one potential workaround would be to enable Time Machine but to set it to exclude your home folder from backup (if you don’t have enough space to store that).