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The Grumpy Editor's guide to graphical mail clientsThe Grumpy Editor's guide to graphical mail clientsPosted Jun 29, 2004 21:42 UTC (Tue) by dlang (subscriber, #313)Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to graphical mail clients One item I would like to see a comment on is how well the mail clients deal with large mailboxes. and large numbers of new messages. as an example of one of the worst clients I've seen for this it can take Outlook hours to find new messages if you have been on vacation and have a few thousand new messages waiting when it starts up (and you don't want to think of what it takes when you point it at a IMAP mailbox with a few tens of thousands of messages sitting in it) the quality of IMAP support is almost worth an article in itself, a mail client with poor IMAP support treats IMAP as just a means to download messages (a direct replacement for POP), but a client that really uses IMAP can potentially be FAR more responsive. for example an IMAP client can download just the header info for the first screen worth of mail and then download the rest later (while the user is doing useful work instead of waiting for the client to find the messages). Also since the IMAP server understands MIME the client can delay downloading attachments until the user indicates that they are interested in doing so. there's quite a bit more that's possible, but I don't want to make this post TOO big
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IMAP Posted Jun 29, 2004 22:13 UTC (Tue) by ccyoung (subscriber, #16340) [Link] Maybe you'd be interested in Cone and Courier IMAP
IMAP Posted Jun 30, 2004 3:49 UTC (Wed) by dlang (subscriber, #313) [Link] when given a choice I use Cyrus for the IMAP server not Courier, but that's not the issue here :-)is cone a mail client? if so can you give more info on it?
Cone Posted Jul 1, 2004 17:54 UTC (Thu) by bjn (guest, #2179) [Link] Cone is Sam Varshavchik's Pine-a-like, a good match for Courier environments since it comesfrom the same project.
IMAP Posted Jul 1, 2004 17:51 UTC (Thu) by bjn (guest, #2179) [Link] Along the lines of dlang's comment, here we started with UW-IMAP until it couldn't handle theload, and then switched to Courier IMAP until it couldn't handle the load either, and are now switching to Cyrus. So you can perhaps skip a step. :-)
Cyrus IMAPd Posted Jul 9, 2004 9:56 UTC (Fri) by ringerc (guest, #3071) [Link] As others have noted, it might be easier and nicer to skip to Cyrus IMAPdif you're changing mail servers. It's extremely fast even for full-text mailbox searches ("man squatter" for fulltext indexes used on server-side SEARCH commands) and very stable. It's also in steady development, and quite remarkably flexible. You'll have a hard time getting your head around the authentication configuration at first, but it's not really that bad and it's well and truly worth it for such an amazing mail server. If I had to go back to using an ISP's mail services instead of runing my own mail server, I'd just fetchmail to a local Cyrus - I'm spoilt by it now ;-)
The Grumpy Editor's guide to graphical mail clients Posted Jun 29, 2004 22:54 UTC (Tue) by jwb (subscriber, #15467) [Link] I haven't used any of these other clients lately but Evolution works pretty well with huge mailboxes. I have IMAP folders in excess of 100,000 messages and, aside from the initial downloading of the headers, it's surprisingly fast. During the slow operation of downloading headers Evolution does provide status messages, as well.I've found Evolution can open an IMAP folder much more quickly than mutt can open the same maildir. I don't know if it's evolution that's much better than mutt, or if the efficiency is due to Courier IMAP. Either way it's plenty fast.
The Grumpy Editor's guide to graphical mail clients Posted Jun 30, 2004 18:41 UTC (Wed) by im14u2c (subscriber, #5246) [Link] If you have 100000 messages in maildir format, it might actually be the<I> kernel </I>slowing you down, reading through that directory. You might google around and look for ext2 performance stats on huge directories. That's what spawned all that dirhash stuff awhile back.
The Grumpy Editor's guide to graphical mail clients Posted Jun 30, 2004 18:57 UTC (Wed) by jwb (subscriber, #15467) [Link] Yes I agree, dirhash is the best. But the point is that it's much faster to read exactly the same maildir using Courier IMAP than it is to read it using mutt.
The Grumpy Editor's guide to graphical mail clients Posted Jul 1, 2004 16:27 UTC (Thu) by wcooley (subscriber, #1233) [Link] If you use Cyrus IMAP, you can also enable the "squatter", which builds full-text indexes of messages in your folder, so even searching a very large folder takes only seconds. A good IMAP client will determine if the IMAP server supports server-side searching. Evolution does; I don't know about any of the others.
The Grumpy Editor's guide to graphical mail clients Posted Jul 10, 2004 22:21 UTC (Sat) by chbm (guest, #12065) [Link] Evolution uses index caches, that's why it feels so fast until you have a mailbox that's touched by other MUAs.In your case IMAP feels much faster cause Courier preopens the mailbox. You're just moving the burn to the server.
The Grumpy Editor's guide to graphical mail clients Posted Jun 30, 2004 2:46 UTC (Wed) by csamuel (subscriber, #2624) [Link] > One item I would like to see a comment on is how well the mail clients> deal with large mailboxes. and large numbers of new messages. My mailbox at home is over 800MB and has lots of messages (probably of the order of 100,000 - I tend to keep almost everything, just in case). KMail (from KDE3.0, Mandrake 9.0) handles it well. Here at work my mailbox is a more modest 334MB and contains only 23639 messages and KMail from KDE 3.2 (Mandrake 10.0) handles that without any complaints either. cheers! Chris
The Grumpy Editor's guide to graphical mail clients Posted Jul 11, 2004 22:10 UTC (Sun) by eallaud (guest, #22956) [Link] I would say that you should try balsa-2.2.0 (it is just out) if you can. It really tries to use the server-side of IMAP as much as possible (eg threading and searching/filtering is done via IMAP commands), and only loads the barely necessary infos to build the messages tree, and loads only the message you select on-the-fly.
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