[Kde-pim] flavours of mixedmaildir resources

[Martin Steigerwald]

Am Sonntag, 29. Januar 2012 schrieb Bruno Haible:
> Hi,
> 
> I've been using kmail for ca. 13 years, and my requirements are:
>   - to fetch mail from a POP3 account,
>   - to send mail to the SMTP server of my provider,
>   - to manage 1 GB of past mails, spread over 1282 folders,
>     in a hierarchy of 68 directories, while keeping the folders
>     in their original mbox format (because that is the format with
>     the highest interoperability).
> 
> Not so extravagant requirements, I think. No automatic spam filter,
> no mailing list routing, no subject rewriting, no IMAP.
> 
> KMail 4.7.4 can't do this without bringing my machine to its knees.
> <https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=290355>
> "Eight megabytes (RAM) and almost continuously swapping" - that was a
> 90ies joke about Emacs. "Four gigabytes (RAM) and almost continuously
> swapping" - that has been the reality with
> akonadi_mixedmaildir_resource for me since I switched to kmail2.
> 
> The reason is that each time I press Ctrl-L (to fetch mail), kmail
> not only triggers a mail retrieval from the POP3 account, but also
> a "full sync" from the "resource" that contains the 1 GB of last mails.
> In the akonadi_mixedmaildir_resource this code is executed:
> 
>   switch ( mCurrentTask.type ) {
>     case SyncAll:
>       emit executeFullSync();
> 
> The size of this process then quickly goes to 1.4 GB physical, 1.8 GB
> virtual, and a while later it goes past 2 GB. And it never goes down
> again.
> 
> This behaviour would be OK for a directory into which some daemon is
> delivering new mail (such as /var/spool/mail/). For an archive, it
> is inappropriate and catastrophic.
> 
> In an archive directory, the desired behaviour is different in two
> points:
> 
>   1. Ctrl-L never triggers a full sync.
> 
>   2. Even when a full sync is done (to feed nepomuk or the mysql
> database), the process needs to drop the contents of a folder from
> memory after it has processed it. My archive had 1 GB. People who are
> subscribed to several mailing lists can easily have archives of 10 GB,
> which are completely unprocessable on a 4 GB machine if you don't free
> some of the allocated memory.
> 
> It boils down to having a boolean attribute in the customization GUI of
> a mixedmaildir resource:
> 
>    [X] New mail will be delivered in this directory hierarchy.
>    [ ] No new mail is delivered here. This is more an archive.

I think this should be auto-detected. If the mbox file did not change, 
leave it alone… same for maildir.

And AFAIR that is how KMail 1 handled updating its index files, but I am 
not completely sure about that.

Ciao,
-- 
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA  B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7
_______________________________________________
KDE PIM mailing list kde-pim at kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-pim
KDE PIM home page at http://pim.kde.org/