Re: [Evolution] Dealing with huge imap accounts / best practise?

[Milan Crha <mcrha redhat com>]

On Mon, 2019-03-04 at 11:14 +0100, fkater--- via evolution-list wrote:
> Caching seems required for Evolution to make search work, doesn't
> it?

        Hi,
no, it doesn't. The local cache/summary (basically the folders.db file
of the mail cache) is needed to view the folder content in the message
list in the GUI. Some searches can be done in this local summary (like
when searching for mail with recipients or with certain subject), but
some require the whole message (like when searching for "Message
contains"/"Body contains").

> It created a 50 GB cache here though.  Thunderbird has flaws
> but offers a Global Search feature, based on small sqlite db, around
> 350 MB here.  It works with no further local mail cache.

That's a very large difference. What is your setting in Evolution, to
download everything locally for offline use? That could explain it,
especially if your account receives messages with large attachments.

> Concerning IMAP server search
>
> Thunderbird has the Searver Search feature but that did never work
> here (tested against dovecot IMAP server). Evolution does not seem
> to got that way neither.

No again. When you are online and the server supports searching and
when you use an expensive search, like the "Message contains"/"Body
contains", then this runs on the server, thus there is no need to
download all the messages locally. Any other searches are run on the
local machine, with eventual message download from the server (it
depends whether the header used in the search is available in the local
summary or not).

When you say 'huge', what does that mean for you, please? One of my
largest folders has 185K messages, some have only around 20K. I know
there are people with many more messages.

        Bye,
        Milan