On Tuesday 04 January 2005 14:22, Jens Mayer wrote:
> * On Tuesday 04 January 2005 10:06, Maarten wrote:
> > Excuse me, but I use kmail with imap daily, so I feel well informed
> > enough to say that kmail doesn't have a good imap implementation.
>
> It's far from being perfect, that's true. One thing to keep in mind is
> that some (or most) MUAs do not behave the same way with every IMAPd
> they should work with - some have been known to have troubles with
> specific IMAP servers, some don't.
Yes. I started out with UW-imapd but changed over to courier+SSL, just as you
use. That works fine, I think. The speed increase with the transition from
Mbox (UW) to Maildir (courier) was tremendous, for large folders at least.
> > It 'kind of works' is more appropriate. For one, it is dead slow with
> > large imap folders, it looks like it is caching every single message
> > locally.
>
> My biggest IMAP folder so far had about +110k messages (A huge SPAM
> folder I wanted to run some statistics with), and I can tell you every
> client I evaluated was quite slow on this folder - mutt being the
> slowest, KMail being much faster than thunderbird. Additionally, once
> cached KMail handled this folder better than Thunderbird which somehow
> seemed to refresh the cache more frequently (and unnecessarily) than
> KMail.
110k ? W o w. I have nowhere near that big folders, Mine are at most between
10k and 20k messages. When they grow beyond that, I usually move them away
to an archive subfolder and make a new empty folder instead.
So how slow are we talking about ? I know that if I move a handful of messages
TO a folder that contains over 15k messages, that I have to wait for Kmail to
rebuild or retrieve a new index (or whatever it does when its progressbar
below slowly starts moving... 1%... ... 2%... ... 3%...)
That is just aggravating. Is there something amiss here or is this supposed
to take several minutes ?
Else, I'm reasonably sure that what bites me specifically, is that I tend to
read my mail on three systems. Once I launch my MUA on an other system,
Kmail sees its cache (or index?) is stale, and starts retrieving it from
scratch. I get the distinct impression it really start from scratch; it
doesn't try to somehow add the odd-hundred new messages, but retrieves all of
the old ones as well, is my impression.
But I'd have to sniff on the wire to see what it actually retrieves. I'll do
that, just to understand the problem better...
> > Next, it lacks both filtering and searching in imap folders, which
> > renders it next to useless.
>
> Sad but true. If you really need those features, KMail is not an option
> (yet). I can wait for it, as I don't rely on them.
Um, yes. Filtering especially, but also searching. I always hate it when I
need to look up some really old useful info or something. I have three
recourses; copy an imap folder to a local folder and then search locally,
login on my mailserver and use grep to find my message, or else launch
thunderbird to do it. Obviously, thunderbird wins here, even though I grep a
lot :-)
> > Finally, it happens on occasion that it gets confused and mixes all
> > threads up, so that you seem to have posts from wildly different
> > threads together.
>
> This is a problem I can't confirm.
Okay, I can see how this might be a local problem (somehow).
> What I do not like about thunderbird:
Oh yes. I do not like thunderbird much yet either (else why would I still use
Kmail...) so you certainly have a point here.
> - Too many nice features regarding configurabilty rely on plugins who
> might or might not work with the next version of thunderbird. KMail is
> far more configurable.
This, as stupid as it may sound, is my main problem with TB. I wanted it to
mimic Kmail's behaviour, so first order of business was change the colors the
{new, unread,etc} mails were in. Can't find that option anywhere. Tried to
change the font sizes, ditto. My memory may be lacking, but I distinctly
remember being less than impressed with the config options.
Weird, eh. I'm used to commandline tools for most everything I do, yet I have
a problem with TB's 'look'. Sometimes I do not understand myself, really. ;-|
But you say there are plugins for that ? Hm, must check those out then...
> Anyway, when working with Gnome or Windows, thunderbird is my MUA of
> choice - and it's a good one.
It's just a tool, a MUA, so I tend to use whatever's available (TB, Kmail, Evo
or Squirrel. Still have to try out mutt.) But as of yet, I've not found one
that does all that I want it to do. (maybe if Forte Agent gets ported to
linux AND understands imap. Hah. Like that's ever going to happen...)
I don't (usually) complain. Except I wanted to say that Kmail may be just
fine with imap, but it's nowhere near being 'good' or perfect. Yet.
Greetings,
Maarten
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