performance issue (imap spool on san)

[Joseph Brennan]

--On Thursday, July 27, 2006 2:58 -0700 Nikola Milutinovic 
<alokin1 at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
> Say you have a GUI IMAP client XxX. Say you start it up and click on the
> INBOX. What would you desire/expect XxX to do?


First I'd like it not to open inbox unless I do click on inbox (or unless
I configured it to open inbox).  That's a pop holdover.  As if, what else
would I be running a mail client for?  Well, with imap I might be wanting
to check some other folder.

When opening inbox, a client is usually configured to list new messages.
If so it really needs only to fetch headers of new messages.  The rest do
not matter unless the user wants to scroll back, and even then it might
fetch only the next N messages back.

Some clients actually open and cache headers of all subscribed folders.
That does not scale on a system where users are advised to subscribe to
many shared folders.

My telnet client could do 'ls -lR /' when I log in, and cache it, but it
doesn't :-)

Joseph Brennan
Columbia University Information Technology