[gentoo-user] Re: Mail on multiple laptops

[Patric Schmitz <bzk0711@aim.com>]

On Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:09:44 -0400
Michael Pobega <pobega@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 04:02:07PM +0000, Grant Edwards wrote:
> Yeah, my debian-user folder is at 54,000 e-mails now. It's pretty
> crazy, it takes me about four minutes to access it. I don't know why
> Mutt needs to continually cache the data, I thought the idea of
> caches was to prevent things like this from happening?

That is crazy indeed. I had the same "problem" here and thought a
bit about it, and so, just to hopefully clear this up for others:

Why should one store years old mailing lists mail _on the server_
for ever? 

Why is IMAP useful, because you can access your mails from
anywhere and from multiple clients. But that counts only for those
mails which have a chance to be of interest at different places
(complete personal email, probably).
This is certainly not the case for year old mailinglist mails (which
are, in the case of debian-user at least, also available from public
archives). 
Why store these maybe hundred of megabytes of mail on the server,
there is just no reason. And it should not surprise that clients (and i
guess servers alike) need a huge amount of time to scan through huge
directories, even if only comparing the local cache.

If you don't trust the public mailing list archives, do it like I did
for now. Create a local mailbox (you have to find some certain machine
for this of course, i suggest your desktop at home). 
I called it "archived mail". Then create e.g. a folder debian-user and
just move all mails from the IMAP server to that local folder.
Afterwards you can still access your archived mails from that list,
just not from everywhere (well actually you can by using the public
archives), but you have to ask yourself again: Why should i need that?

Now I have the huge folders lying on my hard-disk, i can search
_quickly_ through tenthousands of mails, and the access time for
opening the remote folders is greatly reduced. If I feel like cleaning
up again, maybe after 1-2k mails, i just move them over again. Reducing
unneccessary traffic, saving precious resources, and able to search the
archive much quicker.

This is just my opinon, maybe someone who had _all_ his mails on IMAP
till now might rethink this.

Cheers,
Patric