[MlMt] Ideas to reduce the footprint of MailMate

[Bill Cole]

On 10 May 2020, at 21:43, Guillaume Barrette wrote:

> Hi Sam,
>
>    Thanks a lot for doing the test, this is really appreciated and 
> give me a better cue that something shouldn't be right with my setup!
>
> I was thinking that maybe the problem was with Gmail since my 3 emails 
> who are really used are from Gmail, the 2 others are from my web 
> hosting provider and only have 109 messages in one and 21 in the 
> other, but now that you said that you have 2 Gmails addresses, then 
> there must be something else.

GMail does seem like a potential source of heavy traffic, since they 
conflate IMAP flags (which MM exposes as "Tags") with mailboxes, so that 
their mailboxes are a bit like "Smart" mailboxes. If you have rules that 
tag mail automatically you could end up downloading mail twice or more.


> So, do you mind giving me some insight on how your Gmail accounts are 
> configured in MailMate? Myself, I followed the information that we can 
> find in MailMate manual 
> [here](https://manual.mailmate-app.com/account_setup). So my 
> `Important` + `Starred` mailboxes are unchecked (not subscribed), but 
> I kept checked my `All Mail` mailbox (subscribed). Is it what you have 
> or you also unchecked the `All Mail` mailbox ?

I also have 2 GMail accounts, one with the recommended subscriptions and 
one with all mailboxes subscribed. I do not see heavy bandwidth usage, 
but I also have very little mail activity on those accounts.

> Now I think I'll put my email accounts offline and activate one for a 
> while and do this procedure with each account and see if one is the 
> problem or if it's MailMate in general.

An excellent approach.

One thing I have seen (and submitted a bug report for years ago) is that 
MM can get into an infinite loop state where it repeatedly runs the same 
IMAP commands against the same mailbox until the mailbox is offlined. 
This could cause heavy bandwidth use but you would probably notice that 
because it comes with an activity spinner for the account & mailbox 
stricken by the bug.


> One question for anyone reading, I don't think this is the case since 
> from my understanding this should simply scan the local copy of the 
> emails, but does the more that we have smart mailboxes in MailMate the 
> more it needs to fetch emails online?

No. Unless you have rules attached to those smart mailboxes that tag or 
move messages automatically, they should not cause any server 
interactions.



-- 
Bill Cole
bill at scconsult.com or billcole at apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Not For Hire (currently)