If you tar my Maildir, it comes out at about 8.6GB currently. That’s about all my mail since October 2001. Notable exceptions are most of the Spam I’ve received and any messages from LKML.
Doing a first time sync with offlineimap takes an amount of time that is truly scary. Over 8 hours. When connected directly to the IMAP server with 100base.
With only 2.7GB synced so far (on one of my machines), there’s been about 210,000 messages transfered. There are about 500,000 messages to go. So a total time of around 24hrs. eep.
Thunderbird did an offline download of the 700MB of my INBOX very quickly (i.e. at a speed that was encouraging and made me not stop it before it completed). Evolution seemed to be really slow, and want to put header and body in separate files (hrrm… that’s going to be a lot of files). However, I am not ready to switch mail clients to Thunderbird (a variety of reasons).
I tried switching to dovecot over the weekend – didn’t turn out so great. The sync speed was even slower, and syncing from remote dovecot to local dovecot was horrifically slow (probably would have completed by the end of the week). key word, probably.
I don’t consider my Maildir to be big. I don’t get many large attachments.
The fact that Evolution uses about 250MB of memory when I start it up, and 300MB now after sending a few mails is sort of disturbing. Although this does seem to be down from previous versions – so horray Evolution team for that.
I wonder why such a key piece of infrastructure seems to be so neglected.
I found very same thing. After the dovecot mail files become somewhat larger speed goes down. It takes forever to save a mail to the IMAP folder.
Splitting mail up to many folders helps. Each folder gets a new file on dovecot, and new files are fast until they become bigger then about 100MB! Which is not much, it is just a ‘fraction’ of the e-mails I have received this year.
If anyone know a solution, I would be glad to hear it.