[MlMt] MailMate so slow it locks up

[Steven M. Bellovin]

On 15 Jun 2016, at 17:36, Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:

> 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.
>
For what it's worth, I have 1.4M messages across 8 accounts.  The 
largest account has ~630K messages, another has 430K, and the rest are 
much smaller.



         --Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb