[SGVLUG] Question for tonight (in case we have no presenter)

[Emerson, Tom]

I have a hopefully simple question that might make for some interesting
discussion tonight if we find we have no speaker.  As some of you may
know, I run an IMAP server on my home DSL line -- this picks up my
"osnut at pacbell" e-mail and makes it available to the computer rigth next
to it (most of the time...)

Recently, however, I've branched out a bit -- I've set up my kmail
client on my laptop to connect to my "home" machine as well as the
outlook client here at work [just got an upgrade to outlook XP here -- I
see it now does IMAP when in "corporate" mode]  When at home, things
aren't too bad when opening folders with thousands of messages -- after
all, the 100mbit lan cable is only 3 feet long...

When I connect from the outside, however, things are a bit different --
every "new" setup takes a bit of time to download the headers of
years-old messages, and even opening existing folders takes a noticable
amount of time.  After some review, I find I can easily archive and/or
simply dump 90% of the "old" messages because they exist in some other
(public) archive.

Most e-mail clients do have archive/delete-old-message support, but I
don't want to make management of "old" messages dependant upon one
client or another (and at home, I'd probably like to keep the entire
archive anyway -- as big and klunky it may be, it's still faster than a
web-interface to the "archive"]

I should also note that the messges are saved in Maildir mode (many
small files in a few directories) rather than "mbox" mode (large
monolithic, though ascii, files...)  I suspect this will make things
easier ;)

What suggestions do you have for this scenario?  Think about it and tell
me at the meeting...