David Brown wrote: > > I've done some performance comparisons on different mail stores to see what > was best. > > Slowest is a simple mbox-type folder. The problem is that mutt can only > tell that the file changed, not what changed about it. > > Next best is to have the messages in a maildir folder. Startup requires a > stat of everything. If it still is in cache, it is fast, otherwise it can > be a bit sluggish.
For large (multi meg, 1000+ messages) I find Maildir to be far slower than MBOX. Reason is that mutt has to stat and read each individual file, to get the relevant header information. Far faster to just read through the one MBOX file. > Fastest I've found is to keep my messages on cyrus-imapd. It's a bit of a > pain to keep running. Cyrus keeps indexes of the messages (usually in > memory), so reconnecting is much faster. If I recall correctly, Cyrus IMAP keeps the messages in a Maildir, and, as you say, maintains an index. This allows very fast folder opening, and very quick message retrieval. The drawback is the forced going through IMAP. Personally, I like Maildirs as they allow me to easily grep through for that single message I seek. It is also far more corruption resistant. > Worst, by far, is connecting via IMAP to an overloaded Exchange server. > Aside from Exchange just not really understanding IMAP, it pauses and > grunts a lot. Never tested this. I would tend to believe it, though. GMail is supporting IMAP access. Have you tried that? I have not. > mutt does well with all of these. Mutt's IMAP handling leaves things to be desired. I understand that the best IMAP client is pine. I have used mutt's IMAP. It works. I have never used pine myself, so I rely upon the experience of those that I trust -john -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
