Uday Reddy writes: > > The new vm-list-imap-folders is fine for modest-sized accounts. On my > > main account with > 100 mailboxes, it takes forever. I guess there > > isn't much to do about this, since IMAP implemented in Emacs Lisp is > > bound to be slow. > > This is actually an IMAP problem, not of Emacs Lisp. (Actually, Emacs Lisp > speed is quite ok on modern machines.) > > IMAP provides a "LIST" command which is required to be fast but doesn't give > the status of the folders, and a separate "STATUS" command which is allowed > to be slow and has to be queried individually for each folder. I would > expect that many IMAP implementations take it to be a license for being as > slow as possible.
I doubt it's a server problem, because Mulberry scans my 395 mailboxes much faster then vm-list-imap-folders. Another candidate for explaining the difference is threads: Mulberry runs multiple threads that do IMAP requests in parallel. My personal workaround is a specialized version of vm-list-imap-folders that checks only the folders to which messages can be delivered. That's only 20 out of 395, and speed is no longer a problem. Which points of course to the strong point of VM: it's a fully scriptable mail reader. Even if something is not perfect, you can at least work around it. Konrad.
