Re: [Evolution] Message Filter vs. Search Folders - Open Discussion

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Wed, 2010-11-03 at 19:10 -0400, Philippe LeCavalier wrote:
> > As to efficiency, I can't off-hand think of an obvious reason why
> search 
> > folders should be faster than filters unless the criteria are just 
> > simpler. In fact I suspect it's more a matter of perception than 
> > reality, given that filters act just once and search folders need to
> do 
> > some processing every time you visit them. And of course you need
> to 
> > compare like with like in terms of matching criteria.
>
> All my mail gets filtered when the headers are downloaded and since
> I've chosen to download mail locally the filters take a surprising
> amount of time to complete.

One question: in your Junk controls are you using "do not mark as Junk
if sender is in my address book", *without* marking "only check my local
address book"? If so, Evo is doing an LDAP lookup for every source
address in every message, which can be slow.

> In other words, if I loaded all my mail in my Inbox and simply used
> search folders the speed is only limited by the time it would take to
> select the appropriate search folder.

Meaning the time taken to run the search selection criterion on the
contents of the mailbox. This should be similar to the time taken to run
a filter, unless the implementations are completely different.

> However, and this is significant for me, if I do leave all my mail in
> the Inbox when I load my mail in a webclient I'll be wading through
> thousands of emails because those search folders
> won't exist server-side.

Unless you do at least some server-side filtering, in which case it's
all done before you even look at it. I use Gmail filtering for volume
mail, so messages just appear in the right folders when I access it.
Google has more compute power than my desktop :-)

poc