[MlMt] Ideas to reduce the footprint of MailMate

[Travis Risner]

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/IMAP/tracy%2540mymail.org@mail.mymail.org/INBOX.mailbox/dreamhost.mailbox/"
>> Upshot? I have every non-spam email I've received for the past 27 
>> years, and I can find any given one of them almost instantly.
>>
>> Works for me, but of course YMMV.
>>
>> HTH
>>
>>
>> www.valleau.art
>>
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