Hi Guillaume,
I have no direct knowledge of how MM works, but I have suspicions. If
MM is __synchronizing__ with all the IMAP servers, then I suspect that
it has to do something for each of the 200,000 (or 500,000) emails to
verify that it is still there and hasn’t changed. Maybe it downloads
each email and compares checksums. Maybe it has a clever way of
interacting with the IMAP server so it does not have to download every
byte of each email. Even so, MM still has to do something for each
email every time it checks. That might be what is chewing up all the
bandwidth.
My solution is similar to Tracy’s. I run MM on my laptop and run a
different email program (Thunderbird) on my “server” at home. That
email program has rules that will transfer selected emails (that I
don’t need to see immediately) to local email folders and remove those
emails from the IMAP server. For other emails that I have looked at but
don’t need online any more, I manually transfer to other local email
folders which also removes them from the IMAP server. Thus, the only
emails I keep on the IMAP servers are the ones that I want to do
something about later.
I too will be looking at Mail Steward and Horcrux to see if that is a
better solution.
HTH,
Travis
--
Travis Risner
On 5/9/20 2:46 PM, Guillaume Barrette wrote:
Dear Tracy,
Thanks for your reply, this is greatly appreciated!
Yes, I understand around 200,000 emails may be quite a lot and no I
don't need all of them instantly and yes I was thinking of doing
something to reduce that (backup + moving emails to submailboxes that
would be unsubscribed). However, I saw some other mentions of people
having 200,000 or 250,000 or even 500,000 emails in MailMate, so I was
wondering if my count was that high before making the move.
On my side, I don't find MailMate really slow with that amount of
emails, it's really regarding the bandwidth + disk space + RAM. I know
the disk space + RAM would shrink by having fewer emails, but was
wondering if the bandwidth would be the same since the only emails
that are touched are the recent ones, so does removing the old ones
will really reduce the bandwidth or it is simply how it works and if
so I'll need to find a way around (maybe raising the delay for the
Synchronization Schedule of most mailboxes will help or creating a
script to toggle the Online/Offline state of the mailboxes could
help...)
With other email clients I wasn't synchronizing all those years for
all my email accounts since there was a feature to only synchronize X
months, but I like MailMate and I'm sure I'll find a way to put things
in a shape that I like, but I was wondering regarding the different
options that I could approach those points before making a big move.
With that said, thanks for giving an insight on your workflow and
mentioning MailSteward and Horcrux (I didn't know this last one), I
may go for one of them.
Thanks for your help,
--
Guillaume
On 9 May 2020, at 13:31, Tracy Valleau wrote:
Hello,
Do you really need 200,000 emails to be instantly available to you,
or are you using 99% of that just to store old emails?
If the latter, then you could inprove your situation immensely by
using an email archiver, such as Horcrux, or (my preferred)
MailSteward (which I have been using for well over a decade.)
These will move your emails into a database, and allow you to remove
them from your server (ie: delete them).
I filter out my spam first, and then use MailSteward to archive the
rest. It has never failed me, and is quite fast at finding emails. My
collection goes back to 1993.
You can use either the SQLite version, or the MySQL version. I used
MySQL for a very long time, and then realized that I really never
referred to 20-year old emails, so I put them into a SQLite table,
and saved it out separately. I can load it in if I ever need to find
an old email, and now I keep only the past 6 or so years active in
MailSteward at any one time. My own copy of MailMail usually runs a
total < 50 active emails, so it is lightning fast, and resource
light. If I really need to see an old email, I just run MailSteward
and look it up. In practice, I may do that twice a week or so.
Note that this works because while I have probably 30 email addresses
on my server (I'm a developer), I have them all forward to a single
mailbox. I did that originally because that way I only needed one
email account in MailMate (the account everything is forwarded to)
and MM can still filter everything based on the original address a
given email was sent to. MUCH more efficient than checking 30
different accounts from my computer!
AND, that in turn allows me to use MailSteward, which is designed for
Apple Mail, but conveniently has a "also collect emails from this
folder" which I have filled with my local storage:
"file:///Users/tracyv/Library/Application%20Support/MailMate/Messages/IMA
