[Evolution-hackers] Re: about evolution imap local email storage

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

On Wed, 2003-04-16 at 00:29, Antonio Xu wrote:
> Hello, NotZed
>           I have some questions about imap local email storage. I found 
> evolution will copy every readed email's source and its html body to 
> local. so if I have 1 GB emails on server, I would have 2 GB emails in 
> local imap storage. I think it is a very serious problem. Why did 

Do you have 1GB of email on your server?  i.e. just saying a problem is
possible doesn't mean it occurs or in practice is a real issue.

> evolution copy every readed email to local? Could we remove this bad 

Because the imap 'cache' isn't really a cache, and it was written pretty
simply.

> feature? I think we should leave  emails on server instead of copy it at 
> local, that is why we using IMAP.  I know this feature will be helpful 

I'm not sure we want to remove it.  Because it provides a transparent
and more complete 'offline' mode.  Without it we may need to re-copy
stuff for offline mode operation back off the server when we go back
offline, because, because of the way offline mode works, the imap code
deosn't know what files are needed for offline mode until it actually
goes offline.  If you are going offline, and you're using a modem, the
last thing you want is to have to re-copy mails that got expired from
your cache.

> when evolution switch to offline, but evolution have another feature 
> which can allow user download every email from server before switch 
> evolution to offline. I suggest this issue should be solved before 
> evolution 1.4 release. I have seen your and fejj's comment on bug 
> #21894. When will you begin solving this issue?  

Well, the newer/next version of outlook always works off local email,
and only uses the server connection to download the mail once/as a
backup.  It goes into 'offline' mode implictly, hiding the
network/server problems from the user, and letting them take more
advantage of the local grunt computer workstations now posess.

So this way of working isn't completely unexpected/different from other
similar mail clients, and takes advantage of vastly under-utilised
resources on most desktop machines.

Its also way too big a change to be going into 1.4 at this point.