Mail archiving

[David Gibson]

On Thu, Sep 05, 2002 at 05:36:20PM +1000, Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 05, 2002 at 05:26:40PM +1000, David Gibson wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 05, 2002 at 03:08:29PM +1000, Matthew Hawkins wrote:
> > > Strange, I've had mutt open a 50,000+ message bugtraq mbox with no
> > > problems.  What you might like to do is increase the size of $read_inc
> > > and $write_inc (from memory).  This can be done on a per-mailbox basis
> > > with hooks if you don't want to make the changes global.
> 
> 50,000 messages?!? How long does it take to open it? It doesn't mind holding
> all these messages, it just takes forever to open it.
> 
> > > With the default settings, mutt will spend too much time updating the
> > > display and not enough parsing the mailbox.
> 
> It helps, but not much.
> 
> > It is an inherent problem with mbox that there's essentially no way to
> > produce a message list without reading the entire file.
> 
> Not true. Netscape when it reads mailboxes produces an index file.
> Subsequent openings produce the message list with no delay. Theres some
> checks in there to ensure that the index file accurately convers changes in
> the file, but it works fine. Not only that, for me netscape can create an
> index for a mailbox faster than mutt can open it. Don't ask me why.

Sure - but the only way to create the index from scratch is to read
the entire mbox.  If the index and mbox ever get out of sync
(e.g. open the mbox with a mailer that isn't aware of that index
format) you have to reread the entire mbox again.

-- 
David Gibson			| For every complex problem there is a
david at gibson.dropbear.id.au	| solution which is simple, neat and
				| wrong.
http://www.ozlabs.org/people/dgibson