mutt opinions [was: Re: [plug] [OT] Gmail Opinions]

[James Devenish]

In message <20040617100820.GE26977 at patrick.wattle.id.au>
on Thu, Jun 17, 2004 at 06:08:20PM +0800, Cameron Patrick wrote:
> | Mutt would need to use a "safe" indexing format in order to avoid
> | problem with people or mail daemons making manual changes to
> | mailboxes, given that the formats it uses are often "open" ones that
> | people (er...me) abuse.
> 
> Ahh.  I /think/ the Maildir spec says that Thou Shalt Not Change A
> Message Without Changing Its Filename, but I could be wrong.  You
> could make the index safe at the cost of stat()ing every file in the
> directory.

Ah yes, of course. Perhaps it could be like NNTP: the message is
indexed, but it might not be there when you ask for it (i.e. index
is misleading, but safe).

> There are a couple of patches around to implement indexing support,
> but they are broken (in terms of the index not matching the message
> itself), or offer minimal performance gains (probably because they use
> Berkely DB; yuck!).

Oh dear, I don't want to have to all users update indices for gigabytes
of e-mail every time BDB goes through a minor version change!

> Part of the problem is that mutt wants to read in all the message
> headers when it opens a folder even with the indexing patches.

Ah, yes, of course. I guess that means a major revision to mutt: only
query a database for a particular series of headers when the need
arises.

> I'd think that opening a folder could be made near-instantaneous if it
> only has to read the headers of the last N messages,

Well, I suppose with Maildir it need only read in files from the 'new'
folder in the first instance. For mbox, you could skip over x bytes. Of
course, this would only be compatible with 'unsorted' sort order. I
guess this is why people leave mutt open and never quit -- it doesn't
re-read all messages each time it updates its display.