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#Mac mailbox cleaner series#
#Mac mailbox cleaner mac#

Mail will create a new calendar named Automator within the Calendar app on your Mac. In the sheet that appears, give your calendar event a name and click Save.A copy of the workflow will be made in a new Automator window.From the File menu, choose Convert to….We could have created this workflow as a Calendar Alarm at the start, but we can also convert the workflow to a Calendar Alarm now. One of the types of Automator documents that you can choose from is a Calendar Alarm.

#Mac mailbox cleaner mac#

Let’s have the Mac do all the lifting, both heavy (cleaning up the database) and light (doing it for us). Wouldn’t it be great if the Mac would simply clean up the Mail database every month without we humans having to worry about it? You can run this Automator workflow anytime you want by double-clicking it to launch Automator and clicking the Run button.īut as we said earlier at least part of the reason why people invented computers to begin with was to handle repetitive tasks. Mail will quit (if it’s running), the database will be cleaned up, and a speedier Mail will be reopened. To run the workflow, click the Run button in the upper right-hand corner of the workflow window. From the File menu, choose Save… and name your new workflow. From the Launch Application pop-up menu, choose Mail. Drag the Launch Application action into the Workflow area underneath the Run Shell Script action. In the search field above the list of actions, type open. Our last step is to re-open Mail so we can see if the app feels faster and more responsive. This eliminates gaps, defragments the data, and cleans up the database file structure. The vacuum command cleans the mail database by copying its contents to a temporary file and rebuilds the database into a smaller amount of disk space. In our example, we’ve copied and pasted the command for macOS Sierra (version 10.12). When you’ve finished Step 9, your workflow should look like this.

For Sierra (10.12): sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/V4/MailData/Envelope\ Index vacuum.

For El Capitan (10.11): sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/V3/MailData/Envelope\ Index vacuum.

For Lion (10.7), Mountain Lion (10.8), Mavericks (10.9), or Yosemite (10.10): sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Envelope\ Index vacuum.

For Snow Leopard (10.6): sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index vacuum.

Be sure to include the semi-colon at the end of the line.

Select all the text in script shell script box and copy and paste the command below depending on which version of the OS is running on your Mac.

Drag the Run Shell Script action into the Workflow area underneath the Quit Application action.

In the search field above the list of actions, type shell.

When you’ve finished steps 4, 5, and 6, your workflow window should look like this.Our second step is to issue a command using the shell, an interface to the UNIX system that is running on your Mac. Leave the Ask to save changes box checked.

From the Quit Application pop-up menu, choose Mail.

Drag the Quit Application action into the Workflow area.

In the search field above the list of actions, type quit.

Our first step is to quit Mail if it’s running.

In the sheet that appears, select Workflow and click Choose.

In the window that appears, click New Document.

Open Automator (From the Finder’s Go menu, choose Applications and scroll in the window that appears to find Automator.).

But we’ll make it easy by simply copying and pasting it when the time comes. In this example, though, we will use one UNIX command.

You don’t need to know any fancy scripting or programming languages to use Automator.

#Mac mailbox cleaner series#

Our goal is this: Make Mail faster by cleaning up the mail database.īecause it’s not a good idea to try to do maintenance on an open Mail database, it’s best to quit Mail first, clean things up, then re-open Mail and see if the clean-up resulted in a speed-up.Īutomator executes a series of actions to achieve a result. Lucky for you there’s a fairly simple solution, made even simpler by using Automator, Apple’s easy-to-use app for automating tasks that often need to be performed repeatedly.Īnd isn’t that at least part of the reason why people invented computers to begin with–to handle the mundane tasks that repeatedly pop up in our lives? One reason why this can happen is because the database used by Mail to store messages can grow to a large size thanks to message fragmenting and gaps in the database when messages are deleted. If you’re using Apple’s Mail application on the Mac you’ve probably seen the app slow down over time.