Re: slow to open mutt/ delete mails
atstake atstake wrote:
> I have just loaded an mbox with 17,000 mails & it takes around 20
> seconds to open. But when I quite ("q") it starts "writing"
> messages which take around 20seconds.
As Bob Proulx sugegsted, archiving your old emails is a really good
idea.
'archivemail' does this well - it will move emails older than a certain
date into a gzipped mbox. I have mine setup to archive each mailbox by
month-received, and I have a toggle macro in mutt which
expands/contracts my mailbox list to include/ignore the archived
mailboxes. Most of the time I don't care about the archives and don't
need to see them.
I wrote a script to do the initial archiving-by-month (it needed to call
archivemail multiple times since I had multiple months of emails which
needed to be in separate named-by-month archives). There seemed to be
some oddities with emails in the archives being marked as unread (though
in their original maildir form they had been read), but I've not looked
into what the problem was, yet. It only took me a few minutes to go
through all the archives and set them all to 'read'. Next month, when I
do another round of archiving, I'll look into what the read/unread
problem is.
If you have hooks setup for compressed mailboxes then mutt can work with
those mailboxes transparently, as if they were normal mailboxes. The
hooks look something like this:
open-hook \\.gz$ "gzip -cd %f > %t"
close-hook \\.gz$ "gzip -c %t > %f"
append-hook \\.gz$ "gzip -c %t >> %f"
It works really well :-)
Karl.