Slow operation and generally unusual behavior are signs that may indicate that permissions need to be repaired on your Macintosh's hard drive. To do so you can run Repair Disk Permissions from within Disk Utility, located on your hard drive at: Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility Note: There is no need to verify permissions before you repair them. Unless you can read the report and understand what Disk Utility proposes to do, there is little point in verifying first. Open Disk Utility, and on the left side of the screen select your hard drive, then select the First Aid tab on the right side and click on "Repair Disk Permissions." 5) DO A FILE SYSTEM CHECK AND REPAIR DISK I recommend that you occasionally restart your Mac, and hold down the Shift key right after the startup chime is played, and keep it held down until the spinning black bar cursor appears.
This procedure invokes what Apple calls a "Safe Boot": and your Mac will report that it has been booted (started up) into Safe Boot mode. During startup in Safe Boot mode your Mac will do a file system check, entirely in the background, with no working status indicated, or report generated, and any problems will automatically be repaired.
11) REBUILD MAIL’S DATABASE AND BACK UP YOUR EMAIL Periodically deleting old, unwanted e-mail messages, and rebuilding Mail’s database, will usually give Mail a very noticeable performance boost, and help ensure continued trouble-free operation.
Every now and then (or, ideally, routinely as you use Mail) you should go through all of your mailboxes in Mail and delete all of the messages you no longer wish to keep. Then, in Mail, choose: Mailbox menu --> Erase Deleted Messages --> In All Accounts to purge all deleted messages.
After doing this, quit Mail.You can then use this free utility to quickly and easily rebuild Mail's database:
8) CLEAR YOUR DESKTOP Moving things to a location other than on your desktop is an easy and free way to pick up better performance. Users have noticed that reducing the number of items on their Mac’s desktop can noticeably increase the performance of certain activities in OS X. This is easy to do. You can even create one folder on your desktop and put everything on your desktop in it. That will do the trick. Nested items within folders on the Desktop don't count. It is only the total number of items directly on your desktop that matter.