Could your antivirus be the culprit?

Reason for suggesting, currently 200+ emails a day (pop3 and IMAP accounts) no problems. Tried a new antivirus and everything slowed down to unusable IMHO. Switch back to Avast and happy once again.

Pegasus mailstore 125 folders 3.6GB active and 8.2GB in archive folders

WinXP Pro SP3 2GB Ram, DSL - POP3 from ISP and three IMAP accounts (FastMail/Gmail and finally Mercury as local test bed)

I am user of pmail since 1994. I have been installing and using pmail on every new machine. I have a fairly large mail data base, as almost all my mails are archived.

Pmail has always been fast. However, over the past few months, it has become really sluggish - it takes 10 seconds to open a mail lin the new mail folder. I also notice high amounts off cpu usage at this time.

Any suggestions on the reasons ? Since I handle about 100 mails a day, the sluggishness really affects me and I have been wondering whether I have outgrown pmail's capacity.

I can understand a large folder taking time (as it is a single file), but mails in the new mail folder taking time is baffling.

Similarly, if I click on the attachments tab, it takes time,  also on most other functions, the response is very sluggish.

Regds.,

jb