Re: Move messages instead of Copy

[Kyle Wheeler <kyle-mutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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On Tuesday, March  4 at 12:49 PM, quoth Bill Moseley:
>On Tue, Mar 04, 2008 at 10:50:55AM -0600, Kyle Wheeler wrote:
>> If your IMAP connection is slow, though, you may want to consider 
>> using mutt's hcache support, which will dramatically speed things up.
>
>By the way -- are there any "gotchas" with using this?  Say if I use
>another mail program to move mail messages (or move them directly in
>my maildir directory?

There are two "gotchas" that I know about. The first is in the cases 
of poorly encoded headers---the poorly-encoded form is stored in the 
hcache, and that doesn't get updated when you do things like add a 
charset-hook to fix it. The solution is to remove the hcache file and 
let mutt rebuild it. The other "gotcha" only applies if you're 
upgrading mutt or if you're following mutt's Mercurial repository. 
Occasionally mutt updates the content or format of what it stores in 
the database. When it does this, it's usually able to figure out that 
the hcache files are in an outdated format (if not, mutt will crash), 
but for whatever reason, mutt leaves the old files in place and simply 
doesn't use them (in other words, mutt goes back to slowly fetching 
all headers). The solution, once again, is to delete the hcache files 
and let mutt rebuild them.

If a mailbox changes without mutt's knowledge, the only thing that 
happens is an entry in the hcache becomes stale. The only visible 
effect of this is that the hcache may be bigger than it should be. If 
you move messages regularly, your hcache file will begin to grow, a 
few bytes at a time. The solution? You guessed it: delete the hcache 
file and let mutt rebuild it.

Given all that, I think it's probably worthwhile to have a cron job 
delete all of your hcache files once in a while (monthly?), and delete 
them all every time you upgrade mutt, just to be on the safe side. But 
I don't practice that advice; I delete those files whenever something 
seems slower than it should be (which is practically never) or when 
I'm hunting for more disk space and notice that they've gotten 
particularly large. I've been using hcache support for a long time 
without incident, so I think it's pretty stable at this point. :)

Also, I think BDB databases have issues on OSX (but I use qdbm, so 
that's a non-issue for me). <shrug>

~Kyle
- -- 
If you are going through hell, keep going.
                                                   -- Winston Churchill
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