On 05/12/2020 17.27, Stefan Seyfried wrote:
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.
Correct. However, if you request "threaded sorting" then it has to download many more, possibly all to find the parent of each thread. You can notice it delays for a time, even a minute.
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.
Well, Thunderbird has to ask the same thing now and then, but the difference is that they are stored on disk and the next time it can retrieve from disk, then fetch the new ones. And it keeps indexes of every folder. There is a caveat: imap can save flags, tags, marks, answer status, whatever, which you can create in one machine and see on another. I don't remember if all of them, but at list the "star" (and alpine sets and sees the same star). Huh, I can see in Alpine, Flags, flag details, the name of the flags I created in Thunderbird. So Thunderbird, when opening the same folder another day, has to find and download them and update the local index.
(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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Crispin Now it is maintained by Eduardo Chappa, who previously maintained a set of patches to Pine.
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.
Yes, certainly, Thunderbird has advantages. Alpine has an important one, though: it is faster at operation such as moving/copying thousand of messages, or complex selection filters. Of course, when you have to ssh to a machine to see mail there, Thunderbird is out :-)
Sorry for not posting to users@, but I'm not subscribed there ;-)
Happens. :-) -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 15.1 x86_64 at Telcontar)