On 05.12.20 15:55, Carlos E. R. wrote:
Ah, of course, Alpine only caches the headers (I don't know if all). But in RAM, so the cache dies on existing the program.
And what alpine does (or at last did 15 years ago when it was still pine and I last used it...) is it downloads only the headers it really needs to show you your selection. Example: your terminal is 80x25, (al)pine will show you 20 lines of headers of your inbox. So it downloads only these 20 headers. You hit "page down" and it will download the next 20 headers. This is a huge advantage if you are opening a mailbox with 100k mails. Most other mail clients will just see "there are 100k mails which I did not yet see, let's download all the headers". I think that's what at least mutt did 15 years ago. But the IMAP implementation of mutt was not very good anyway. Back then. No idea how it is now. Depending on the implementation (single / multithreaded) this can of course block the UI and additionally, even a huge provider like gmail will have some "fun" collecting and delivering the 100k headers and probably the servers will struggle quite a bit to satisfy this request. (al)pine does this in a exceptionally good way. No wonder, as it was built by the person who created the (horrible, IMHO) IMAP standard. OTOH, once thunderbird has built the initial cache, I really don't care too much about efficiency of the mail polling but rahter enjoy its other features which, *for me* make it more desirable to use than (al)pine. Sorry for not posting to users@, but I'm not subscribed there ;-) -- Stefan Seyfried "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- Richard Feynman