On Sat, 3 May 2008, Steve Holdoway wrote:
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 (:
No, it is a mail client problem.
mail client A takes minutes to open a remote imap folder.
mail client B (alpine) takes seconds to open the same remote imap folder.
Conclusion,
mail client B has a better design, and is better for sysadmins.
mail client B is clearly doing something less intensive on the network.
Turns out that B is using clever IMAP commands to just receive the last
headers in the folder, and is consequently heaps quicker.
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??
Not really. $200 for a 750GB drive - seems to me that disks are getting
hugely cheap.
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!
yes/no.
Several lists provide a search engine of their lists that works quite
nicely. Other lists provide no usable search engine. Simpler to just keep
a copy of all lists.
There are emails from a person that you read and go, "twit" (or similar)
and decide to dump. Later, you receive an email from someone asking for
help. The first thing you do is seach on that person's name. Since you
have a copy of all previous correspondence, you find if they have indeed
written to you.
From a commercial perspective, you keep all written correspondence. Why
not the same with email ?
Derek.
--
Derek Smithies Ph.D.
IndraNet Technologies Ltd.
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
ph +64 3 365 6485
Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
