[Evolution] Need help re slowness

[David McNab <david rebirthing co nz>]

Hi,

I'm running Evolution 1.0.8 on Debian sid, over KDE 3.0 (sometimes) and Gnome2 (other times).

Evolution is an amazingly good email and groupware client in almost every respect except one - speed.

For one thing, evolution takes about 10 seconds to start up (on a 1.5GHz Athlon XP).

Also, it takes forever to read in emails, even when reading from local spool file (not POP3). Specifically, 
it takes up to 1 second to read in each message and sort it to the folders.

On sending (via SMTP on localhost), it takes up to 10 secs to get a short text-only message out.

On the whole, Evolution is my email prog of choice. But the painful performance has for now forced me onto 
Sylpheed (which works super-fast in the same environment). But I find Sylpheed to be a bit flaky - for 
example, outbound mails fail to actually send, and no indication is given of this.

Is there anything I can do to make Evolution run faster?

(To be fair, I have to say that I've got about 45 physical folders, each with between 10 and 4000 messages).

All help will be gratefully appreciated.

Kind regards
David