Say you have a GUI IMAP client XxX. Say you start it up and click on the INBOX. What would you desire/expect XxX to do?
That depends on the situation.
I would expect to see all mail headers in my inbox.
Really? Even if there are 20,000 messages and you are connected via modem?
So, how do you do that in XxX, other then fetching all mail headers? How do you do that in Pine and Mutt?
Being console-based, they have it easy: they only load those headers that they are currently displaying. Mulberry lets *you* decide what to do, with separate values for "initial download" and "increment". You can specify limits of headers to get if you want to. When you scroll through the mailbox, it may need to load additional headers. So maybe you have to wait at that point, but the *initial* wait is much shorter.
Now, fetching it EVERY time, well, that would make me switch to another client. So, caching comes in.
Caching sucks. It's bad on public computers, e.g. in pools, because of privacy issues. In general it's flaky if you work on more than one computer. Mulberry doesn't cache anything and still it's very fast.
What is your "modus operandi" in Mutt or Pine for this? If I understand
correctly, you just make IMAP queries to the server and display what you desire. Hmm, call me lazy, but I would mark such a feature in TB unwelcome. When I click on the INBOX, I expect to see it's contents. That is the semantics I'm used to, when I "click on a folder". Is this semantic somehow confronted to the root philosophy of IMAP client/server?
It's tailored to exactly *one* use scenario: high-speed connection to a fast server. Good luck when that assumption isn't valid!
Furthermore, if TB is implementing those semantics in IMAP protocol in an undesirable fashion, what should it do to become desirable again?
Huh?
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