Dave Hamilton from the Mac Observer is thinking about switching to Mail.app.
He has had a gutful 
of his old mail client:
Mailsmith, by most rights, has stagnated. It pains me to write this, because as I said, I’m a really big fan of BareBones, and enjoy a great working relationship with their head-honcho, Rich Siegel. But it’s true… Mailsmith hasn’t had a public release/update since March of 2005. Now some folks may argue that it doesn’t need an update, and for those folks, I’m sure that’s correct. My big problem is that I manage a LOT of e-mail… I have almost 1400 mailboxes within which are nearly 200,000 e-mail messages. I pretty much save everything, and it’s saved my ass in HUGE ways over the years, so I ain’t gonna stop.
So, he wonders, does Mail.app have what it takes to manage a large number of mailboxes and bucketloads of email? Or is he better off archiving off a large slab of the emails and staying with Mailsmith?
My advice is not much good. I only have about 35,000 emails spread over four IMAP accounts and about ten mailboxes (see further, “How the delete key is your best friend”). That’s chicken feed by Dave’s standards.
Justin Blanton once ran a challenge to find the largest Mail mailbox, putting up his own inbox of 22,000 as a candidate.
What’s your experience? What’s your biggest mailbox? How many mailboxes does your Mail.app handle without working up a sweat?
Can Mail.app take the load? Does size matter?
Incidentally,
I am an Apple engineer / admin at a hospital in Los Angeles, about 120 plus Macs and we just upgraded to Exchange 2003 (finally, thank heavens) and we are using the Exchange setting in Apple Mail.
It works very well, as I anticipated, since the Exchange engineers did a type of clustering to maximize email performance, etc.
It is not uncommon for a user to have 5000 plus emails and a few have 13,000 emails. They now have a quota of about 1 GB to 2 GB of space, (keep in mind attachments in your inbox and sent will count against your space quota).
E-mail is coming down (caching) pretty quickly now, even on the initial setup with 5000 plus emails, the cache download is about 15 minutes, if that.
On the Exchange 5.5 / NT 4 servers, this would take hours and more often crash Apple Mail.
People were mistakenly thinking Apple Mail app was horrible, but it was the Exchange 5.5 / NT 4 servers (of course we the engineers knew this), heck even the Windows Outlook clients were slow and crashing.
Apple Mail is pretty solid and getting better.
New servers, all is great now.
Another thing on Exchange Servers and Apple Mail, Public Folders.
A nightmare for Apple Mail app connecting to Exchange (2003, via IMAP / Exchange).
If your site has tons of items in Public Folders (and we have 51,000), Apple Mail just interprets these as Mail messages and wants to cache /dowload them (Apple Mail default). (Yes you can use an IMAP Prefix Path, but that can also block you from seeing other folders, etc).
This sucks, since now you are congesting Mail app unnecessarily with traffic and e-mails you can care less about, and it is constant activity / syncing.
Solution: I sent an email to our Exchange admin with all of my Mac users (this will eventually be handled by Active Directory).
He will make a script to “Exclude” these Mac Mail App users from seeing Public Folders.
Can’t wait for Leopard Mail 3.0, should be great
Anyone who wishes to correspond on Apple Mail and especially in an Enterprise / MS Exchange 2003 environment, feel free to email me, I am thinking of getting a Blog / correspondence on this, it is huge and all of us Mac users, Mac / Windows admins could use the knowledge.
macguitarman@mac.com
Hello All,
I have the following problem I have a 181000 mail inbox on apple mail and it crashes every other second. I’m using Apple mail 3.01, i rebuilt the envelop etc. The total mail folder is about half million mail for about 12G.
my inbox is a way over 2G.
Entourage works but is damn slow. Can anybody help Me?
My current favorite setup is to use Gmail’s IMAP as my repository of email, and to sync it using Leopard Mail 3.0.
I am very careful to not allow mailboxes each to get too large, hence, I archive according to year, e.g. 2007, 2006, 2005 etc. for general emails.
For specific issues: letters, business projects, each of these are in separate nested folders and subfolders, hence, no one mail box gets too large.
I have emails going back to 1996, and I’ve kept almost everything.
For people who don’t think email archives are important — it occurs very rarely, but sometimes you need to find the contact of someone, or some small piece of information. That’s where a lifetime email archive comes in. I am in the legal profession, and I find it imperative to keep email archives of business correspondence, in case a client refutes something. You can then dig into your email archive, and prove it in writing. Nothing beats keep records. People who don’t bother keeping email records don’t need this level of detail in their life, but there are those of us who do.
I’m very happy with Gmail IMAP synching with Leopard mail.
I can’t comment on size limits because I have not pushed the system to its limits yet. It is purring along nicely.
The advantage of using Gmail IMAP is that you can use Google Desktop search to index the gmail archive. If Spotlight can’t find it, maybe Google search can.
With my setup, Spotlight indexes the IMAP emails on my Mac, while Google Desktop indexes the same IMAP emails on the Gmail server.
Giovanni Pau @ Nov 18th — can’t you split your 181,000 into several subfolders, e.g. 2007, 2006, 2005, or some filing system like that. I have thousands of emails, but no one mbox gets any larger than around 2,000 emails. Admittedly, my file structure is very complex.