Re: maximum nuber of messages in mutt?

[dman <dsh8290@rit.edu>]

On Thu, Feb 14, 2002 at 12:25:29PM -0800, Brian Nelson wrote:
| Ian Balchin <inksi@imaginet.co.za> writes:
| 
| > Hi,
| > 
| > My debian-list folder in mutt has over 5000 messages in it despite
| > some weeding out.  Pretty soon I shall have to go and make a coffee
| > while waiting for it to open.
| 
| More powerful mail readers (/me ducks) cache messages much more
| efficiently than mutt.
| 
| Emacs gnus, for example, only fetches/displays unread messages unless
| you tell it otherwise, which makes it far faster to open and read
| folders.

Mmm, how does it know which message(s) are unread until it reads
through the (mbox) file?  How does it know where each message starts
and ends (to perform seek()s) without reading through the file looking
for a "From " line?  If it has some external datastore with that info,
then I would consider that part of the folder format.  (if you used
'mutt' or 'vi' to modify the folder, that extra data gnus keeps would
be incorrect, but it wouldn't know without reading the file, and
reading the file is the bottleneck)

I'm not trying to make a gnus vs. mutt war or anything like that, I
just don't understand how, using an mbox folder, it is possible to
avoid the bottleneck of reading the file.  (IOW, please explain how,
if I were to start making BrandNewSuperMUA, how I could implement such
a feature)

-D

-- 

All a man's ways seem innocent to him,
but motives are weighed by the Lord.
        Proverbs 16:2