Arthur Pemberton wrote:
On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 4:05 PM, Aaron Konstam <akonstam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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
file? I doubt it.
yes I think it would be.
I believe mbox would be much slower. Deleting a thread would force the
system to search through the entire file to find the messages, delete
them, then compact the file to close up the space (there'd be a lot of
fairly big holes in that file).
In maildir format, it only has to drop the files containing the threaded
messages. The holes in the folder index would be much smaller and
easier to compact.
I've never compared the two with actual data, but the logic seems sound.
But then again, I used to eat library paste when I was a kid. You can't
go by me. :-)
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