On Sat, 03 May 2008 19:43:47 +1200 (NZST) Derek Smithies <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sat, 3 May 2008, Steve Holdoway wrote: > > > > I have no problems with sylpheed, and only use imap. It only brings down > > new headers. However, I think that people with 100,000 emails in a > > single folder may also need to look inwards for the cause of the problem > or outwards. > > Tools like procmail are great - they automatically redirect mail list > messages to the correct subfolder. On a busy list, with all messages going > to > one folder, the folder size can grow quite large. > > Why should I have to manually move messages from a folder just because > the mail client can't cope with a large folder? > I want all the messages, so I can easily search backwards through for old > posts... > Besides - It is a gigahz machine. The mail client should cope with lots > of messages in the folder. If the mail client cannot cope with lots of > messages, it is a software design issue. pine/alpine copes Perfectly with > lots of messages. Other mail clients fail - that was my point. Woah there... the mail client is just reading the mailbox, and the design of that mailbox is down to the process serving your imap requests. You may have a local copy of the email, but you're also using remote software to manage / deliver new mail as well. Although it's an irrelevance, and a service you're paying for, but your ISP has to administrate / back up all of these emails as well. You can probably guess what I primarily do for a living - trust me, when you've got millions of mailboxes to look after, it's a huge undertaking (: I think that you're also not taking into account the limitations of the filesystem itself. Each email is a file, and to have hundreds of thousands of files in a single directory will never be efficient. How many levels of indirection will you be going through on an ext3 system?? If you're wanting a searchable resource, then I personally think that a mailbox and mail client is a poor choice of toolkit. It would be a fairly trivial task to import them into an ht//Dig indexed resource or a wiki - although I have yet to see any mailing list, let alone a popular one, have a high enough s/n ratio to make it worth keeping everything! Just my $0.02, Steve -- Steve Holdoway <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
