Mailspring amazingly slow on Mac

Help
1

Hi,

I’m giving a (new) try to Mailspring (Verison 1.16.0) on Mac (Sequoia 15.6)

I am surprised to see how Mailspring is slow. Every action takes seconds everytime (tens of seconds sometimes), even the simplest action like selecting a mail in the list.

I’ve read there are known issues with big mail databases.
I have a Gmail account with ~15GB of mails. This is a lot. Though none of the email clients I used so far seemed to have issue with this.

Is it true that Mailspring can not handle this set of mails?
Is there any wrong configuration I’ve done?

Thank you for your help
– Laurent

Post-edit:
In case it helps,

  • My Mac is a Macbook Air M4 2025 with 24GB
  • I run no plugin with Mailspring.
2

Find same delays/sluggish experience on MAC very 12.7 as well. Aldo found it to be slow on large mail files and smaller mail database equally poorly.

3

We can’t make a generality from our two cases.

Though, if it happens to others/all, how can people keep using Mailspring? To me, it is unusable unfortunately.

If does not happen to others, why does it happen to me?
I’d like to hear from people not having the problem.

Maybe Mailspring people can reply too?

Cheers

4

I am having the same problem. A coworker and I both switched to Mailspring and we’re both having issues with pinwheeling during simple tasks. Both of us are on Macs.

1 Like
5

Sorry to hear about the performance issues. With a 15GB+ Gmail mailbox, the initial sync can cause significant database activity that slows things down — the SQLite database is being written to continuously as older mail syncs in. A few things that can help: (1) Give the initial sync time to complete — performance usually improves significantly once the full mailbox is indexed. (2) Check if the sync engine (mailsync) is using high CPU in Activity Monitor; if so, it’s still actively syncing. (3) Make sure you’re on the latest version of Mailspring, as we’ve made several performance improvements in recent releases. (4) If you have multiple Gmail accounts, each runs its own sync process, which multiplies the load. I’d love to know if performance improves after the initial sync completes — please let us know.