[plug] Searching Email

[Cameron Patrick]

Leon Brooks wrote:

> >> I have 530 mailboxes with 1.4Gb of mail since 1997.
> 
> > On the machine I'm using to write this message, I have 1.8GB of
> > e-mail in about half as many mailboxes, so perhaps I have a similar
> > problem. I think the problem has been raised on this list before but
> > no one knew the magic bullet.
> 
> KMail doesn't seem to mind 4GB of mail in 98 MailDirs. Takes about a 
> minute to search one 30,000-message box.

Mutt is appalling with large Maildirs and IMAP boxes, and merely bad
with large mboxes.  (It can be made slightly faster with Maildirs,
BTW, if you use the noatime mount option.)

Lurker can search my PLUG archives with ~25000 messages in less time
than it takes Mozilla to render the results list (i.e. substantially
less than half a second).

Cameron.