Re: Limiting the amount of headers to download ?

[Philip Van Hoof <spam pvanhoof be>]

On Mon, 2009-05-11 at 11:32 +0200, Sergio Villar Senin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> it's easy to see how the average number of emails in user's inboxes has
> dramatically increased especially after GMail's rise. Nowadays is quite
> common to see users with 2000-3000 headers in their inboxes, and in a
> near future 5000-6000 will be the average.
> 
> Although memory consumption in tinymail is absolutely fantastic even
> with those huge numbers we have to take into account that there are some
> operations like sorting or searching, that are really very time
> consuming in small devices due to the enormous processing power they
> need. Even the "innocent" get_headers operation (in combination with the
> use of a tree model) is a really heavy operation when performed for the
> first time in huge inboxes.
> 
> So taking into account that tinymail's main target are those
> small/handheld devices I suggest to add a compiler option that when
> enabled, will limit the amount of retrieved headers to some extent
> (don't know yet, might be 1000 headers, or headers from last 2 months,
> whatever... suggestions are welcomed)
> 
> What do you think?

That Camel's IMAP synchronization wont allow you to do this.

Go ahead and try it, or read the code ;). You need the full hash of UID
versus Sequence number of all messages, else the synchronization is
completely foobar.

What you could do is fetch minimal information for the top (total - max)
messages, and full information for the tail (total - max) ones. 

I promise you this wont be easy, though.


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
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gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
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