why is windows mail so slooooowwww?

  • Thread starter Thread starter invader
  • Start date Start date
I

invader

Windows mail appears to be far slower than Outlook express was back when I
was running XP.

For example, a search by "From" in my deleted items folder takes at least 2-
3X longer. There are approximately 150,000 emails in that folder. Even
sometimes searching my Inbox which only has about 1,000 emails in it takes
longer than OE did.

Frequently the program becomes nonresponsive for a couple of seconds when
doing something. A good example is when replying to a message. It'll blank
out for a second or two while its "thinking" about something.

Deleting emails is slightly sluggish, and occasionally when I click an email
to view it, it'll pause for a few seconds.
 
Not sure. But the first thing I would do would be to get them out of the
Deleted Items folder, since apparently you don't intend to delete them and
leaving them there is putting them at great risk. Create a subfolder named
Saved Messages or something under your Inbox folder and put them there. Then
just left the computer sit, turned on, for a while so it can get the search
index squared away.
 
You have 150,000 e-mails in your deleted folder? No wonder it takes
forever. Do you need all those? I doubt it. Clean it up and Windows Mail
will be much faster. If you do need all those e-mails, archive them and
save them offline.

Vista is slower thant XP, that's a given, so you need to do some
housekeeping on your system.
 
"Zim Babwe"
Vista is slower thant XP, that's a given, so you need to do some
housekeeping on your system.
Click to expand...

While that may be your opinion of Vista, Windows Mail is in no way slower
then OE. You can search in Windows Mail instantly. A search in OE of
150,000 emails would take along the lines of 2 minutes on the average
system.

Why Windows Mail is taking longer the OE in this case, is odd. I don't
think anyone ever pushed it to that extreme. I have 9,856 emails in my
entire store (all of 2006 and 2007). I just did a search for "phone" and
2,871 emails popped up in less then a second. If you understand how Windows
Mail was developed then you understand why.

If I get bored I'll import my mail store over and over again and see at what
point it starts to falter.
 
You have 150,000 e-mails in your deleted folder? No wonder it takes
forever. Do you need all those? I doubt it. Clean it up and Windows Mail
will be much faster. If you do need all those e-mails, archive them and
save them offline.
Click to expand...

Archive them? How? I'd love to do this. I need to keep them accessable in
some way, so that I can look up when I need to reference something from long
ago.

My anti-spam program I *think* used to delete its anti-spam folder
periodically and they probably made it into delete items. I get approximately
500-1000 spam emails per day.

--invader

Games I Play:
The Cerberus Incident, http://www.landofdev.com/cerberus/
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Out of curiosity, what was the size of your Deleted Items.dbx?

I haven't looked at the moment, because I hate having to navigate to the path
where windows hides the email store, but I do know that the total size of the
email store (including Deleted Items, Inbox, ...) is about 3 GB.
 
Out of curiosity, what was the size of your Deleted Items.dbx?
Click to expand...

BTW, didn't I read somewhere that Windows Mail dumped the DBX file in favor
of a one-file-per email system? I haven't poked around in there yet, so I
don't know the facts of the matter.
 
Why Windows Mail is taking longer the OE in this case, is odd. I don't
think anyone ever pushed it to that extreme. I have 9,856 emails in my
entire store (all of 2006 and 2007). I just did a search for "phone" and
Click to expand...

I have 7,500 emails in the "Junk E-mail" folder alone that have accumulated
since I upgraded. That's 2 weeks worth, and doesn't count the 15% of emails
that get through the Windows Mail spam detector.
2,871 emails popped up in less then a second. If you understand how Windows
Mail was developed then you understand why.
Click to expand...

I presume they're using the windows search technology and the searchindexer,
which is why I'm very surprised it is slow. A decent search index should be
able to search every file on my PC in reasonable time.
 
Yes, that's right. I mean no disrespect but your claim of a 150,000 email
store sounds a little "out there". I
was curious as to your existing DBX file size when you used OE.

A DBX file will usually blow up once it goes past 4GB (MS support is 2GB).
I've had some hit 7GB and be ok but they do eventually blow up. The largest
store I've ever had to deal with was 14GB. That user had just under 40,000
emails.

Granted attachments will make all the difference in the world but holy crap!
You have a lot of email.
 
Yes, that's right. I mean no disrespect but your claim of a 150,000 email
store sounds a little "out there". I
was curious as to your existing DBX file size when you used OE.
Click to expand...

The exact number reported in windows mail is "143657". Unless I have reason
to suspect otherwise (such as a Window Mail bug), it should be accurate.
Granted attachments will make all the difference in the world but holy crap!
You have a lot of email.
Click to expand...

Generally I don't receive attachments, and any attachments that do arrive are
usually viruses that were stripped out by McAfee. So I would guess the emails
are fairly short, which explains why so many fit in a 3 GB store.

OE did become unstable at one point under XP and I had to clean out some of
the deleted items folder; perhaps it hit that 4 GB limit you were talking
about. If I remember right, it was having trouble bringing up items at the
bottom (most recent) end of the folder.

I'm hoping there's some way I can simply nuke the Windows Mail deleted items
folder, and then archive the old DBX from OE. Someone must have written a
shareware or freeware app that can make sense of the OE DBX format.
 
Well, you don't have DBX files any more right? All your email is in Windows
Mail? Is so then each email is in it's own text file. Which is why this
app ROCKS! Only, I like WLMd better.

If you're going to archive your deleted items then archive what you have in
Windows Mail. Why do you need to go back to DBX? Search your store folder.
You'll find a Deleted Items folder and in there is all your email. Burn it
to CD and you're done.
 
Well, you don't have DBX files any more right? All your email is in
Windows
Mail? Is so then each email is in it's own text file. Which is why this
app ROCKS! Only, I like WLMd better.
Click to expand...

It very nicely left all of the old DBX files laying around consuming disk
space, so I still have them .... if I want them.

I'll take your advice and look into the new file format, because you're right
it might be easier to deal with than that crazy DBX format ever was. I'm
assuming the files are plaintext -- headers, blank line, body -- in the usual
internet format ?
You'll find a Deleted Items folder and in there is all your email. Burn it
to CD and you're done.
Click to expand...

And how do I search the archived copies later? hmmm... maybe in those times
of need, good ol' "grep" will save the day.
 
It very nicely left all of the old DBX files laying around consuming disk
space, so I still have them .... if I want them.
Click to expand...

You mean in windows.old?
And how do I search the archived copies later? hmmm... maybe in those
times
of need, good ol' "grep" will save the day.
Click to expand...

You can do a plain text search if you wanted to. I would do a plain text
search of well known SPAM terms and delete them. Try to clean up that mess
your spam software created.
 
I'll just jump in at the top here.

McAfee and your antispam programs are contributing to the slow performance.
There are quite a number of problems being caused by such (see the windows
mail newsgroup that I'm xposting to).

You need to turn off email scanning. see www.oehelp.com/OETips.aspx#3 Its
turning out even worse for WinMail.

DBX files are a thing of the past. The current situation is that there is a
single database file that holds the abstracted information from the messages
and the messages themselves are now stored as individual eml files that are
located under directories that match the folder names in WinMail.

For more information see www.oehelp.com/backup.aspx which also includes
information on importing from dbx files.

As to the performance, I tested folders in the beta that had over 132,000
messages in them and the performance was not great, but it was not as slow
as you seem to be experiencing. I would ascribe most of that slowness to
McAfee et al., but you can also help performance some by compacting the
database. See my utility that allows for that to be easily accomplished:
www.oehelp.com/WMUTil/

steve
 
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