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Re: mail box format (was Re: Unidentified subject!)



On Thu, Nov 26, 1998 at 05:48:05PM -0500, Raul Miller wrote:
> > Mutt's support for maildir is still immature -- mutt has performance
> > problems because it doesn't fully incorporate new mail as it's detected
> > and because mutt doesn't record some state information when it does
> > incorporate the new mail.

Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org> wrote:
> The only real maildir problem in mutt is that under some circumstances can
> forget if a message is new of not.

It can also forget if messages are deleted or not [just hit 'x' for an
example of this behavior -- I have 'x' remapped on my system to tell me
what version of mutt I'm using.  Or use any other mechanism which quits
without expunging deleted messages.].

And there's the performance problem I just mentioned.

Maildir, by design, puts messages in a special directory that the
mail user agent is supposed to check periodically for new messages.
Mutt won't take them out of that directory except when you expunge deleted
messages (and in some cases it won't even do it then till you've read
the messages).  This means that if you have 600 new messages that it will
continuously re-scan those 600 messages every time a new message comes in.

This is rather silly, since Maildir defines a way of putting status flags
on messages, and as far as I can tell the only reason mutt is leaving
those messags in the new/ directory is because it won't use the status
flags mechanism to indicate "new" or "deleted" status.

-- 
Raul


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