On 2013-04-06, Jonny Osch?tzky <jonny.oschaet...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Nick, > >> The local read test really seems to indicate that it's not the database >> backend that is controlling performance when switching folders here. It is >> presumable network communication with Google's imap servers. And that >> presumably means that I can't do much about it, or can I? > > I can confirm this. > > If you have a big mailbox (my "All Mail" contains ~150,000 messages), > then the Google IMAP server is very slow. I've checked this with > Thunderbird and the result is mostly the same. TB opens the box very > fast and then it takes a long time to update the header cache. > > The IMAP protocol itself causes this, because it needs to synchronize > the folder. The bigger a folder is the longer this process takes. > > I solved this problem for me with offlineimap and archivemail. I don't > need the All Mail folder since I use labels for all my stuff and mailing > lists. So it results in different Maildirs on my PC which are > synchronized by offlineimap in the background. Older mail is archived by > archivemail in gzipped mboxes. That works great. :)
I'm pretty good at sorting things into folders (labels) as well. Sometimes something gets misfiled, and "All Mail" is a fine fallback when you're getting desparate. At that point the long wait serves as little slap on the wrist to remind you to be more careful about labelling things. Usually if I get to the point where I decide I'm going to have to look in "All Mail" for something, I fire up a browser and do it via the GMail web UI. The host-side search facility just can't be matched by mutt (or any IMAP client I've seen). -- Grant
