[SGVLUG] E-mail archiving -- looking for ideas & techniques

[Emerson, Tom]

> -----Original Message-----
> Behalf Of Chris Smith
> 
> What mail client and server pair are you using? It shouldn't strictly
> be necessary for the "comparing notes" time to increase as you get
> more messages in the folder.

The server is Courier-imap on my "visable" machine [most of the "holes" poked through my firewall go to this machine, specifically for things like imap...]  This machine has duel 500mhz P-III processors and at least 512meg of memory (might actually be a gig...)  From external locations, this passes through a 384kbit/sec DSL (same speed both ways, though still technically an "aDSL" setup...)

At home I'm using kMail (part of KDE).  Since this is "inside" the firewall, the connection is 100mbit/sec.  The client in this case is a 64-bit AMD at 2.??? ghz (AMD 3200, I think, or possibly 3400...)  When I click on the "sgvlug discussion list" folder, kmail takes at least 5 seconds to syncronize

When "out in the wild", I generally use thunderbird, though the other night I had the opportunity to use the native Mac OS-X e-mail client (simply known as "mail")  I think in it's "default" configuration, it was attempting to "download" all messages (even though I had specified "IMAP" as the server type -- fundamental misunderstanding of why someone would use IMAP, I suspect, though in Apple's defense I believe it was loading a copy of every message so that it could perform content-based searches locally...)

I "just now" ran thunderbird and it took 12+ seconds to "open" the sgvlug folder.  There are 7112 messages in that folder, 3 of which were "unread".  another folder with 8000+ "unread" messages is still loading as I write this (it took 30-ish seconds between when I pressed "get mail" and when it started retrieving the headers...)

Tom

btw -- the verbiage "comparing notes" comes from what I saw on a status line of the mac e-mail client -- I don't think any other clients uses that term...