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> What happened? I don't know any reason that programs such as Mutt should have gotten bad. If you have a mailbox with tens of thousands of messages and you al
by WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
> What happened? I don't know any reason that programs such as Mutt should have gotten bad.
If you have a mailbox with tens of thousands of messages and you also use mutt's IMAP capabilities, mutt's UI is going to freeze on you for prolonged periods of time. It also is trying very hard to be efficient and only download relevant stuff, but somehow it translates to "is downloading stuff all the time" (and freezes its UI while doing so).
Basically you reproduce this by subscribing to a high-traffic mailing list, letting it send you stuff for a month, then trying to use Mutt on that.
It also turns out that a maildir with all that stuff is also a stress test for your filesystem, so you add all deficiencies of email client to all deficiencies of your filesystem. Meh.
- taeric 4y agoCrap... Late to getting back to this. Newsgroups used to churn through a ton of messages. I don't remember them bogging down this badly. ;(
- WesolyKubeczek 4y agoMaybe it boils down to async being hard and Mutt actually using synchronous network transfers, obliviously assuming they would be zero-cost which they are obviously not. There's also this work in configuration that you have to do to shoehorn Gmail's labels into Mutt's mailboxes. Oh, have I mentioned already that your 100K+ messages in one maildir will be really, really taxing on your filesystem? I don't know, maybe someone should come and try and reinvent this whole crap around more modern workflows.
- taeric 4y agoI'm tempted to get gnus running again. :) Love to see how things compare to my memory.