I have Norton Internet Security and when I download mail, it takes a
lot of time crunching the hard drive to scan and insert the incoming
mail one by one.

I was wondering if I could create a RAM disk for this process which is
smart perhaps and expands itself when needed to use temporarily for
scanning incoming mail so I make sure the work remains in memory and
not grind slowly my hard disk.

I am looking for specific recommendations on how to possibly create
this RAM or possibly another alternative to relieve this crunching.

Thank you,

Probably it is reading the contents of all temporary files
- also evaluating the contents of all files opened

A client of mine had a similar problem with the Computer Associates
virus checker, every time one of my Apps opened a file it scanned the
entire darn file
- that is not nice when the files are 800mb long

Personally I screen all my Emails with MailWasher and use an old
version of Eudora to read the few that I do not trash.

Virus checkers only catch /known/ viruse

Any client I have that complains about a slow computer, the first
question I ask, is : are you running Norton?

RAM disk is not going to help you. 

I would ditch Norton and get AVG. You will like it much better, it is
very fast, and uses much less resources.

http://www.grisoft.com/doc/1

They have a free home version located here :

http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1

Usually all the Antivirus programs do slow down the transfer of the
data from internet.

I do use an antivirus programm called NOD32 and it is excellent up to now.

It does scanning of everything and it doen't use a lot of RAM memory.