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Mail.app indexes all the time

I use Mail.app for email on my Apple Powerbook.

Lately it had got to a point where Mail.app would re-index the Inbox all the time. This turned into big trouble eventually, with the processor working hard all the time to reindex the mailbox again and again and again.

I put up with it for a while, then eventually found this hint at macosxhints.com which helped but didn’t quite have the answer.

What I did to fix my problem is shown below. This worked for me with Mail.app version 1.3.9 under Mac OS X 10.3.6:

1. Back up all you mail folders first. Just in case. This worked for me but may not work for you. Your mileage may vary. I accept no responsibility for these steps doing anything to your computer or email. That’s your responsibility.
2. Empty your Junk Mail and Trash folders from Mail.app and also make sure you’ve read everything in your Inbox. This is important because we are going to re-make the indexes and this will reset the status of messages.
3. Quit Mail.app
4. Open a terminal window and perform the following commands
5. cd ~/Library/Mail/
6. cd to the directory of your mailbox that is causing problems. Mine was called POP-gra@sf.barkingowl.com
7. cd INBOX.mbox
8. Now we are going to delete some files. Be careful! Only proceed if you know what you are doing…
9. rm .index.ready
10. rm content_index
11. rm table_of_contents
12. restart Mail.app. You’ll see that your inbox now shows all items are unread and it will re-index the mailbox. You can select all messages and mark them as read and you are back to normal.

This worked for me. Mail.app now doesn’t index all the time. Much better.

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