Re: handling very large mailboxes

[James <jtp@xxxxxxxxx>]

I've been tinkering some more with this whole thing.

Once Mutt has completely loaded it works fine when poking around on
the inbox. When, however, I try to open another mailbox (regardless of
size -- sometimes 19 messages, sometimes many thousands), it waits in
the "sorting messages" stage.

A sniffer shows that there is traffic going to and from the mail
server during this step.

What precisely is Mutt doing? Is there some way to speed it up when sorting?

-j

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?
>
>> 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.
>
>> 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
>