Gmail slowness/occasional SMTP hang

[Bob Newell <bobnewell@bobnewell.net>]

>
>     Bob> Interestingly (to me at least!) is that I rarely encounter a
>     Bob> hang while fetching, although at times it can be terribly
>     Bob> slow--- I fetch via IMAP and just from gmail, and I blame gmail
>     Bob> for this for the most part.
>
> gmail IMAP can be excruciatingly slow. One mitigation is to set
> gmailʼs imap folder size limit to something less than infinity (I use
> 1000). But I donʼt fetch from gmail to local, I leave everything on
> googleʼs servers.
>
>     Bob> But what I do encounter from time to time is a hang when
>     Bob> sending.  I'll wait, press ctrl-g, and find the email has been
>     Bob> sent, but control was never returned.  This is with SMTP via
>     Bob> msmtp.  I've never tried to track it down as it isn't frequent
>     Bob> enough to be more than a small nuisance.
>
> I think thereʼs been some work in this area in emacs-29 and/or emacs
> master to make the code more robust. You could try using emacsʼs
> direct SMTP support, but that might not be a small change in your
> setup.

I've changed the topic since this is drifting from the
original subject.

I don't do local fetching either, so to speed up direct IMAP
fetching in gmail, I've set group levels so that on a regular
fetch, only INBOX is checked, rather than everything.  (For
instance the All Mail folder contains tens of thousands of
emails ... I don't want gnus to have to figure that one out
more that once or twice per session!)  Checking only INBOX
helps considerably, but even then at times the gmail IMAP
servers are slow, and gnus can be slow in processing.
(Webmail is orders of magnitude faster, but I prefer to stay
in Emacs.)

On the SMTP side, I've looked into the option you mentioned,
using direct SMTP support rather than relying on msmtp.
There's also the appeal of keeping everything within Emacs,
but I went down the msmtp road long ago because I have dozens
of email accounts and msmtp manages sender identities really
easily.  Switching over is probably desirable but would be many
hours of work.  But nevertheless thank you for the ideas.

-- 
Bob Newell
Honolulu, Hawai`i

- Via GNU/Linux/Emacs/Gnus/BBDB