Mail.app's exasperating 'indexing' causing freezes

[Chris Beaumont]

I like Mail.app's Bayesian spam filtering, but is there any way to turn 
off its indexing capabilities, which appear to be broken? My Mail 
program appears to be indexing my mail folder a large amount of the 
time, and sometimes my machine (an iBook) will just freeze up while it 
chews on the mailbox for minutes at a time..

Its driving me crazy.. How do others manage this situation? Preferably, 
I'd like to turn the indexing off..

Thank you,
Chris