Re: handling very large mailboxes

[James <jtp@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 10:15 AM, Rocco Rutte <pdmef@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> * James wrote:
>
>> I use procmail + mutt and am running into a problem that is limiting
>> my usage of mutt. Currently procmail sorts some very high volume
>> mailing lists into specific folders (mbox format). I'm using mutt as
>> an IMAP client and when I add these mailboxes to my .muttrc file, mutt
>> sometimes takes 5 to 10 minutes to fully load and sort all the
>> messages.
>
> Did you turn on header caching? Are you sure this isn't a network
> problem? What version of mutt? What is large, btw?

I definitely have header caching. I'm fairly certain I have body
caching as well.

The network is definitely not a problem...v1.5.16.

By large I'm talking about, uhhh, ~7000 emails. More or less.

>> Worse, when the timer expires and mutt begins checking mailboxes for
>> new messages, the client freezes until the check is done.
>
> How long does that take? Mutt doesn't do anything in this case except
> asking the IMAP server for mailbox status. Maybe the server needs a long
> time to answer for huge folders?  If yes, then mutt can't do anything
> about it. You need to raise $mail_check then to make it check less
> often.

So you're saying that after mutt initially starts, downloads all the
emails and the initial sorting is done, It'll only check every
$mail_check period to see if there are new messages *without*
re-downloading the entire content of the mailboxes?

>> Is there a way to "thread" or "background" the mail checking process
>> in mutt so that I don't have to deal with this problem?
>
> No, not really, sorry.
>
> Rocco
>