I am seeking advice on how to cause my IMAP client to give me
instantaneous (or as fast as possible) notification of newly received email.
Firstly, let me sidestep the philosophical issue. I understand that
instant email delivery can be a major time-waster in the modern
workflow. However, for a select few of my correspondents, such as
family and close friends, I would prefer that I receive communications
from them immediately, as the email may contain time-critical
information, and they may be unable to reach me otherwise. I hope this
rationale legitimizes my request.
I receive about a thousand emails a day, which is mostly mailing list
traffic, spam, and other bulk email. Of this, I need to read about a
dozen messages, and perhaps briefly scan a few dozen more. I am able to
do this without wasting huge amounts of time due to extensive mail
filters and fast threading features in my mail reader.
Due to the nature of IMAP, filtering needs to be performed
server-side—otherwise a heterogeneous and error-prone system of
client-side filters would need to be deployed at each location I read
mail for each client to benefit from filtering.
Unfortunately, I have almost 100 different folders, many which have
upwards of 30K messages in them. As I understand it, the ordinary IMAP
notification mechanism is only able to receive notifications from a
single selected folder.
So, as far as I know, this rules out automatic notification from the
IMAP server. Polling is also unacceptable due to the large size of many
of the mailboxes, the largest of which takes UW IMAP more than a minute
to select, even in MBX format.
Is this a common problem? If so, how is it handled? If not, why not?
The best hypothetical solution I have thought of so far would involve a
hackish alteration to the mailbox driver. When a mailbox was selected,
a cache file containing vital information about the mailbox could be
created. When the mailbox was selected again, the information could be
quickly regurgitated from the cache without even opening the mailbox.
When the mailbox was written to, the cache file would be deleted. This
would allow very rapid polling, since dispatching each poll request
would take a negligible amount of time.
Has anything like this been tried? In fact, I am puzzled as to why the
current preferred formats do not maintain some sort of rapid-lookup
index that would be a superset of such caching functionality.
My setup is presently composed of a Mozilla Thunderbird 0.7.3 client
running on Windows XP SP2 on a Pentium 4, connecting via IMAP to UW IMAP
2004e running on Linux 2.6 on a Pentium. The mailboxes are in MBX
format, on a local ReiserFS filesystem. sendmail delivers email which
is filtered by procmail and sent to mailboxes with dmail.
Aaron W. LaFramboise
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