On 15 Jun 2016, at 17:10, Alex Bligh wrote:
I'm afraid I cannot provide you with a solution, but at least I can
provide a few comments/explanations. It may not be clear below, but in
general I'm always embarrassed when performance clearly could be better.
... Thunderbird accesses both accounts directly in the normal way.
But maybe not in a fully offline mode?
MailMate is a so-called offline IMAP email client and there are no
options to change that. This means that MailMate fetches and stores a
local copy of every email in the account(s). In addition to that, every
header of every email is indexed. Although optimizations mean that
MailMate can handle fairly large email accounts (some users have more
than a million), MailMate was not really designed to handle “huge”
accounts. There is likely more that I could do to handle large accounts
more efficiently, but few of them are likely to be quick fixes. In
short, MailMate is extremely flexible, but some parts do not scale well.
On installing MailMate, I set up the smaller account first (300,000
messages). It correctly imported the settings, but after that there
was a world of pain. It sync'd all the mail, but only by running 2 CPU
cores at 100% continuously for over 24 hours. Neither Mail.app nor
Thunderbird do this; they import in the background, and (for that mail
account) take only a few hours. Saying that, after 24 hours (perhaps a
bit more), it had pulled all the mail in and appeared to work.
That's more time than I would have expected if you are on a fast
connection and it isn't Gmail (Google throttles traffic), but since it
did finish then some kind of looping behavior is probably unlikely.
I then enabled the larger account. [...] MailMate was fantastically
unresponsive during this time - clearly importing is a real CPU and
memory hog.
Yes, it can be pretty bad, and this is probably beyond the number of
messages MailMate can handle.
The mail server is running cyrus imapd 2.4, has many users on it, and
not one of them has seen any problems with any other MUA to my
knowledge.
Most IMAP email clients are “online” in some sense or they only
index a few headers of each message. And some email clients are probably
just better than MailMate.
I regularly use Mail.app, Thunderbird (on OS-X) an iPhone, and until a
couple of years ago Mulberry, with no issues. I know others are
running all sorts of stuff (so imap logs tell me). The problem is not
the mail server, and it's certainly not the client - Thunderbird is
pretty fast, and Mail.app is positively zippy.
If I understood correctly then you don't have millions of messages in
Mail.app, but I get the point.
In the brief time I used MailMate on the smaller account, I really
liked it. But even if I could get over the import issue, the fact that
if I ever lose my mail spool I'd need to last 48 hours+ without a mail
client that works is a red flag for me.
Very understandable.
Any ideas what this might be and/or how to fix it?
MailMate does support subscriptions which means that if you don't really
need all those messages at your fingertips then you should take
advantage of that. Note that you can edit subscriptions before adding
the account.
I did not design MailMate to handle millions of messages (or even
hundreds of thousands). Internally, all messages are put into one big
pool and everything else is based on queries within this pool ——
including all IMAP mailboxes. This only works with large message stores,
because many parts of MailMate are actually quite fast. But if there is
one thing I've learned then it's that every time I optimize MailMate to
handle X number of messages then someone comes around asking for 2*X :-)
--
Benny
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