Re: nnimap.el is available for way-alpha testing.

[visigoth@naiad.fac.cs.cmu.edu]

Steinar Bang <sb@metis.no> writes:

> Hmm... what does "not optimal" entail...?

> And also: what is "large" in this context?  50 folders?  100 folders?
> 1000 folders?

Well--I believe our Cyrus IMAP server has in excess of 15000 groups
right now.  Obviously, the normal user doesn't subscribe to all of
them.  A cohort of mine does, however, subscribe to 200 of them.  200
-shouldn't- be that bad, but it is.

This is partially because of the mis-match between Gnus' expectations
and IMAP's brokenness.  (Gnus with nnimap is currently somewhat slow.
It's -STILL- more popular with my friends who I've convinced to try
out nnimap because it does little things like tell you how many new
messages you have, or at least indicates that you have some.)

My impression of "not optimal" is this:

Carnegie Mellon decided that IMAP was cool, and got involved with it.
For a -long- time, CMU has had a unified mail/news system, and they
wanted to keep it that way.  This brought up the idea of doing news
via IMAP.  There have been changes to the protocol to make this
easier, but not enough.

The biggest problem I see right now is that there's no way to get
information about folders in the folder-list command.  This means that
in order to get info about groups, I need to LIST them (see if they
exist) and then after that, do an EXAMINE or STATUS on each one.
STATUS is pretty fast--I switched to doing that, and the time it took
became tolerable for my friend with the 200 subs.  EXAMINE is
basically just like SELECT, except read-only (SELECT is the
folder-selection command.)  It should be able to be faster than
SELECT, but it's not.  This is that afore-mentioned up-to-two-second
delay.

The other thing is that it's impossible to notice "new" groups.  You
have to get the whole list.  THis is hairy when you have 15000 folders
on the server.

I'm planning on stirring things up on the IMAP mailing lists over this
soon.  :) I just haven't gotten a draft of any sort written, and don't
really have the time at work right now.  (I'm also not sure I want to
deal with Crispin.)

John.