Re: [VM] Announcement: VM 8.2.0b (beta-testing) release

[Konrad Hinsen]

Uday Reddy writes:

 > > The new vm-list-imap-folders is fine for modest-sized accounts. On my
 > > main account with > 100 mailboxes, it takes forever. I guess there
 > > isn't much to do about this, since IMAP implemented in Emacs Lisp is
 > > bound to be slow.
 > 
 > This is actually an IMAP problem, not of Emacs Lisp.  (Actually, Emacs Lisp
 > speed is quite ok on modern machines.)
 > 
 > IMAP provides a "LIST" command which is required to be fast but doesn't give
 > the status of the folders, and a separate "STATUS" command which is allowed
 > to be slow and has to be queried individually for each folder.  I would
 > expect that many IMAP implementations take it to be a license for being as
 > slow as possible.

I doubt it's a server problem, because Mulberry scans my 395 mailboxes
much faster then vm-list-imap-folders. Another candidate for
explaining the difference is threads: Mulberry runs multiple threads
that do IMAP requests in parallel.

My personal workaround is a specialized version of
vm-list-imap-folders that checks only the folders to which messages
can be delivered. That's only 20 out of 395, and speed is no longer a
problem. Which points of course to the strong point of VM: it's a
fully scriptable mail reader. Even if something is not perfect, you
can at least work around it.

Konrad.