On Mon, 2008-06-09 at 16:05 -0500, Aaron Konstam wrote: > On Mon, 2008-06-09 at 19:56 +0100, Anne Wilson wrote: > > On Monday 09 June 2008 19:31:54 linuxguy wrote: > > > On Mon, 2008-06-09 at 19:21 +0100, Anne Wilson wrote: > > > > On Monday 09 June 2008 19:08:46 linuxguy wrote: > > > > > My email setup is 6 different gmail accounts, being sorted into about > > > > > 25 folders via rules. The largest folder has about 150,000 messages > > > > > in it. The smallest one has 5,000 messages in it. > > > > > > > > > > Is anyone using Thunderbird like this ? How does it compare ? How > > > > > hard is it to move over to it ? > > > > > > > > I don't recall what choices Tbird gives you, but whatever you do, don't > > > > put that number of messages into mbox folders. That isn't what you have > > > > now, by any chance, is it? If so, that's the cause of your problem. > > > > > > I've got a folder with 150,000 messages, yes. Its not usually the one > > > that gives the problem though. Almost always the one that gives the > > > problem is the one that is open when you first start the application. I > > > think there is a bug in retrieving the current message for viewing and > > > receiving a new email into the folder. > > > > > > What is one supposed to do with large email folders, besides manually > > > breaking them up ? > > > > If mail folders are maildir it doesn't matter how many messages you have in > > them. Each message is stored as an individual file. In an mbox folder each > > message is tagged on to the end of the existing file. When you get several > > thousand messages in an mbox folder you have one mighty big file. Consider > > what happens - > > > > You decide that a certain thread of messages is of no interest to you, so you > > delete the thread. First the whole folder - thousands of messages - have to > > be read in. Then the messages have to be identified and deleted out of the > > middle of the file. Finally the compacted file has to be written to disk. > > It works fine for small folders, but slows dramatically as the file grows. > > > > Anne > And what happens if you have 150,000 individual messages and you want to > delete a thread? You think that will be faster than with a single mbox Although the OP was talking about an individual local account, I can say with some authority that an mbox-based mail server simply doesn't scale, since that's what we used to have until we managed to change from UW to Cyrus (an incredibly long and painful process given that we weren't allowed to stop the server at any time). Given that to a first approximation standard-issue users *never* compact their online mailboxes, we had numerous 100MB "folders" floating around until we made this change. It's simply not sustainable. poc -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
