Re: [PLUG] "Online only" terminal IMAP client?

[Walt Mankowski via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Tue, Jun 13, 2023 at 05:11:19PM -0400, N. Albert via plug wrote:
> On 6/13/2023 8:43 AM, Walt Mankowski via plug wrote:
> > You can certainly run without it, but header_cache in particular is a
> > big time saver. Every time you go in a folder, most mail clients will
> > show you all the messages in the folder. If there are 1000s of
> > messages, it will have to download them all every time.
> 
> Thanks, Walt.
> 
> I have to disagree with that conclusion. In my case, it's a big *time
> waster*. I just tried out mutt on one of my email accounts, and I quickly
> realized that there is no practical way that I'm ever going to be able to
> use mutt with it, at least in its default configuration. After about half a
> minute, it was still here:
> 
> Fetching message headers... 952/74578 (1%)
> 
> I'd probably have to wait an hour just before mutt would even load. It's
> trying to download 74,554 headers that are completely useless, and will just
> be discarded since none of this is being saved.

Had I realized you had nearly 75,000 messages in the IMAP folder you
wanted to access, I wouldn't have recommended using mutt without any
caching.

> This isn't a time saver, it's a time waster. Why does it need to fetch
> 74,000 headers, simply to show me the most recent 20 messages that will fit
> in my terminal window only? It could do that in milliseconds. It seems mutt
> was designed with the assumption that either mailboxes would be small or
> data would always be cached locally[1], in which case the performance is too
> poor for my requirements.

The comments at that page are about what I would have said too. Mutt's
been around for a long time, and it wasn't written for IMAP. Caching
the headers locally is a bit of a kludge, but I'm sure it works just
fine for the vast majority of users, and I'm also sure it was far
easier to implement for the mutt developers than your solution.

> 
> Even regular offline clients, like those in the Thunderbird family, are
> configurable in what they download and they'll fetch headers in a certain
> order and show those immediately, so you don't need to wait for a large
> mailbox to populate before using it.
> 
> When I wrote my webmail application, I designed it so that, in theory, it
> would be performant on large mailboxes (in practice, it's a bit sluggish on
> large mailboxes, but that may just be the underlying library). It will only
> issue a single FETCH command to fetch the relevant data for the current
> page. In no case would it ever fetch all of the message headers in a
> mailbox. An IMAP client that supports online operation should never have to
> fetch *all* the headers in a mailbox in order to display the N most recent
> messages. That's just poor design, and webmail clients don't do that, so I
> can't accept that as a limitation of a console based one.
> 
> That said, I'm still putzing around with .muttrc to see if there's some way
> to fix this (if anyone has any tips on what they've put in their .muttrc,
> I'm open to hearing that). Here's what I've come up with so far:
> (in particular, the imap_fetch_chunk_size doesn't help the problem described
> above - it chunks the FETCH commands, but it still tries to download EVERY
> message header).
> 
> The other annoyance I haven't figured out is how I can easily navigate the
> "sidebar". I'd like to just be able to use the arrow keys (which to me,
> seems the intuitive method), but it doesn't seem like that's possible? I see
> there's no default key bindings for sidebar prev/next, and I don't want to
> assign any per se; I'd like to just be able to hit "Left" to go from the
> message listing to the folder listing, and then be able to scroll with the
> arrow keys.
> 
> More inline further down.
> 
> [1] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/358165/mutt-load-message-headers-lazily
> 
> set imap_user=XXX
> set folder=XXX
> set imap_pass=XXX
> 
> set record = +Sent
> set spoolfile=+INBOX
> set imap_check_subscribed=yes
> set imap_idle=yes
> set imap_keepalive=1740
> set imap_list_subscribed=yes
> set header_cache=""
> set message_cachedir=""
> set sort=reverse-threads
> set sort_aux=date-received
> set text_flowed=yes
> set mark_old=no
> set sidebar_format="%B%* %S [%N]"
> set mail_check_stats=yes
> set sidebar_visible=yes
> set sidebar_width=20
> set sidebar_sort_method=alpha
> set sidebar_short_path=yes
> set sidebar_folder_indent=yes
> set sidebar_indent_string="  "
> set sidebar_divider_char="|"
> set shell="/bin/false"
> 
> set imap_fetch_chunk_size=50
> 
> unset envelope_from_address
> set use_envelope_from

For detailed questions on mutt, you're probably better off asking on
the mutt-users mailing list.

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