MacOS Mail.app slow... why? Ask iCloud!

In the last few months I maturated the idea to change my 4 years old Late 2008 MacBookPro. Though I upgraded it to 8Gb Ram thanks to the kit from OWC, opening and managing mail was painfully slow.

I didn’t experience a sudden deterioration of performance, but since I updated the OS to Mountain Lion, a slow and maybe continuous worsening.

So it was difficult for me to realize that something wasn’t going wrong, I was ascribing this to many programs I installed and removed, and to Mountain Lion itself.

Anyway, I decided to change the MBP.

While I was waiting it to arrive (and, incredibly, I am still waiting it to be delivered), I found that some other people is experiencing the same problem. Do a simple search on the apple forum to see.

Well, it seems that the problem is iCloud and the contact syncing.

I don’t know why this happens, I made some test but I wasn’t able to understand the source of the problem, other than the syncing with iCloud itself.

So if you are experiencing the same slowness with Mail (read: 3 or 4 seconds to open an already downloaded email), try this: open the System Preferences from the Apple menu, select iCloud and remove the checkmark from the “Contacts” item, as in the following picture.

[caption id=“attachment_47” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”] iCloud settings in System Preferences[/caption]

(Sorry, the settings are in Italian. But the graphics are the same!)

Close the Mail, reopen it, and… tada! No more problems when opening mails! Now they opens promptly, as when you first bought your mac!

Now, in an ideal world, when I wouldn’t have the need to work today, I’d start a rant against Apple and his crappy iCloud service, and blablablablah… But that’s another day story…

Hope this helps, and stay tuned!