Re: [Evolution] Wish: Uncached IMAP folders

["Patrick O'Callaghan" <poc usb ve>]

On Mon, 2006-04-24 at 23:57 +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-04-21 at 14:47 -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:
> > > > And STATUS means "tell me about *all* emails?  If so, bummer.
> > >
> > > Turns out it's not STATUS but LIST, but in any case you can see the
> > > (impressive) amount of traffic generated by running with
> > > CAMEL_VERBOSE_DEBUG=1.
> >
> > received: * 12147 FETCH (UID 12166 FLAGS (\Seen))^M
> > received: * 12148 FETCH (UID 12167 FLAGS (\Seen))^M
> > received: * 12149 FETCH (UID 12168 FLAGS (\Seen))^M
> > received: * 12150 FETCH (UID 12174 FLAGS (\Seen))^M
> > received: A00049 OK FETCH completed.^M
>
> No, that's neither STATUS nor LIST. That's FETCH, and it's a regression
> since Evolution 2.2. It's fetching the flags and the headers for every
> mail in every folder. Even if you were to prune your cache, it'd refetch
> them every time it checks for new mail.
>
> We _used_ to just use STATUS, and it took about three lines of traffic
> to check how many mails were in folders like your history subfolders. In
> Evo 2.6 (or maybe 2.4) the code was changed and now it re-fetches the
> flags for _every_ header in each folder, each time it visits (which is
> quite frequently).

I'm speechless. Was this done because some IMAP servers were buggy? If
not, there would seem to be no justification for it.

> This is bug #336076. It shouldn't be fetching all the headers for the
> folders you don't care about -- it only needs to use STATUS, if it wants
> to tell you how many mails there are unread in that folder.
>
> There's a patch attached to bug #336074 which might possibly help -- it
> allows evo to check for mail only in active folders, rather than in all
> folders on the server.

By "active" do you mean "subscribed"?

> It does mean that the unseen count for those
> folders won't get updated either though.

If you only check INBOX these counts are wrong anyway, so we'd be no
worse off.

> The real fix is to start using
> STATUS again for checking mail folders.

Absolutely.

poc