<<< Date Index >>>     <<< Thread Index >>>

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.