maildir and gnus

maildir and gnus

[Erik Colson]

Hello,

Some years ago I used Gnus extensively but eventually moved to mu4e for
speed reasons.
Today I'm reconsidering Gnus.  What is the recommended setup for mbsync
with local maildir usage?  Is speed still an issue?

thanks
--
erik colson

Re: maildir and gnus

[Eric S Fraga]

On Friday,  8 Apr 2022 at 14:34, Erik Colson wrote:
> Some years ago I used Gnus extensively but eventually moved to mu4e for
> speed reasons.
> Today I'm reconsidering Gnus.  What is the recommended setup for mbsync
> with local maildir usage?  Is speed still an issue?

Hi Erik,

speed can be an issue with nnmaildir.  It depends on what mbsync does to
file update times in the various maildir directories.  I switched to
nnml for my local email storage as it's a lot more efficient.  For
nnmaildir, my groups had to be rescanned every time and this operation
takes O(n^4) time, where n is the number of emails in the group.  The
rescanning was necessary, in my case, because I was using unison to keep
3-4 systems in sync which meant that gnus had to regenerate the index
tables it uses for each group.

But if mbsync is smart, you may not encounter this issue.  Try it and
see?

eric
-- 
Eric S Fraga with org 9.5.2 in Emacs 29.0.50 on Debian 11.3

Re: maildir and gnus

[Erik Colson]

Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> writes:

> On Friday,  8 Apr 2022 at 14:34, Erik Colson wrote:
>> Some years ago I used Gnus extensively but eventually moved to mu4e for
>> speed reasons.
>> Today I'm reconsidering Gnus.  What is the recommended setup for mbsync
>> with local maildir usage?  Is speed still an issue?
>
> Hi Erik,
>
> speed can be an issue with nnmaildir.  It depends on what mbsync does to
> file update times in the various maildir directories.  I switched to
> nnml for my local email storage as it's a lot more efficient.  For
> nnmaildir, my groups had to be rescanned every time and this operation
> takes O(n^4) time, where n is the number of emails in the group.  The
> rescanning was necessary, in my case, because I was using unison to keep
> 3-4 systems in sync which meant that gnus had to regenerate the index
> tables it uses for each group.
>
> But if mbsync is smart, you may not encounter this issue.  Try it and
> see?

So I finally installed the thing: mbsync / dovecot / nnimap

Still some issues but not speed actually.

best
-- 
erik colson

Re: maildir and gnus

[Wes Hardaker]

Erik Colson <eco@ecocode.net> writes:

> So I finally installed the thing: mbsync / dovecot / nnimap
> 
> Still some issues but not speed actually.

Adding my past few years experience:

1. I went from using nnimap to offlineimap->maildir folders a large
number of years ago.  It worked generally well, allowed easy offline
support (better than offline mode somewhat).  NOV files would build up
though, so I built a script to clean them.  After large quantities of
time (order 2-5 years), it did seem to get slower and slower (probably
from id number lists expanding, but that's a guess).

Anyway, with a recent desktop that no longer moves around I moved it
back to nnimap and its *much* faster than my previous offlineimap
method.  I don't mean just for the transfer though.  I tried mbsync and
got it working, but for some reason nnimap is faster in most respects.
Gnus scanning nnmaildir directories took probably 5-10 times longer than
nnimap when fetching new mail.

Also, another downside of offline/mbsync -> maildir is that it marks
everything as "not new" on the server because you are in fact pulling it
by pulling it (ok, I assume this is true for mbsync -- I didn't verify
that).  There is probably a way to hack the new flag back on the imap
side, but I never tried.  With nnimap, the new flag remains correct and
thus other clients or biff-like utilities continue to work properly.

</ramble>

-- 
Wes Hardaker                                     
My Pictures:       http://photos.capturedonearth.com/