Workaround for Tiger mail.app on IMAP problems

[sumodude]

A lot of people, me included have had problems with IMAP mail crashing out, and systems go into consistant high CPU utilisation.

So here's what I found sorted the problem for me. I have a larger mailbox IRO 500MB, and although mail.app looked as though it had brought all my emails across from the IMAP server, it was still trying to cache the emails, but this process would get stuck, and my CPU would hit 87%. Using the activitity viewer (command 0) I watched mail.app whilst it was successfully caching my mail, and whenever it would get stuck, I either shut the process down and chose to - re-sync the mailbox, or more likely, I would have to quit mail & restart it. This took me several hours - but I'm happy to say that now I have a functioning mail system for the first time in days.

Hope that helps some other people out there.