I HATE Evolution ! Thunderbird ?

Anne Wilson cannewilson at googlemail.com
Mon Jun 9 18:56:46 UTC 2008


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

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