[MlMt] dealing with large mailboxes

[Bill Cole]

On 1 Jan 2019, at 21:42, Rick Cogley wrote:

>> how are folk dealing with this?
>
> I’m new to MM but I’m using EagleFiler for filing. It just copies 
> each email as an `.eml` file and prunes the duplicates. You can 
> encrypt the store, but if you choose not to, EagleFiler just stores 
> the files in `Files` in a structure like this:
>
> ~~~~~
> …/Mail Archive ❯ pwd
> /path/to/my/EagleFiler/Mail Archive
> …/Mail Archive ❯ ls -la
> total 0
> drwxr-xr-x      8 rcogley  staff      256 Jan  2 10:51 .
> drwxr-xr-x      4 rcogley  staff      128 Jan  2 10:51 ..
> drwxr-xr-x  52365 rcogley  staff  1675680 Jan  2 10:51 Files
> drwxr-xr-x@     6 rcogley  staff      192 Jan  2 10:50 Mail 
> Archive.eflibrary
> drwxr-xr-x      2 rcogley  staff       64 Dec 31 12:22 Notes
> drwxr-xr-x     21 rcogley  staff      672 Dec 31 19:26 Smart Folders
> drwxr-xr-x      3 rcogley  staff       96 Jan  2 10:43 Temporary 
> Items.nobackup
> drwxr-xr-x      2 rcogley  staff       64 Dec 31 12:22 To Import (Mail 
> Archive)
> ~~~~~
>
> EagleFiler itself then becomes a way to search the archive of emails 
> you have. To me it’s good enough.

EagleFiler or any other external archival tool it certainly a reasonable 
tactic. Anything that puts scores of thousands of files in a single 
directory (as the 52363 files in "Files" shown) has some risk of making 
the sorts of mistake in handling very large directories that have 
plagued software practically forever, however an archive & indexing tool 
that consciously and intentionally builds such a thing is probably 
better at handling it than an IMAP client which just happens to create 
it as a side effect of mimicking how users handle messages.