Re: [PATCH v3] Allow applying filters to summary consecutively

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  >   As you probably 
  > know, Maildirs were proposed about 25 years ago to address the limitations 
  > of mbox files,

I don't consider mbox files limited.  Why do you think so?

  > in particular to remove the need of a locking mechanism 
  > when the mail folder is accessed concurrently by two programs (e.g. the 
  > mail delivery agent and the mail user agent).

This is a complication in the design; but given that we implemented
this interlocking already (in the 1980s). in practice it is not a
limitation any more.

  >   With Maildirs, which are 
  > now the standard way to store mails, each mail folder is a directory, in 
  > which each individual mail is stored in its own file.

I'm concerned that this will make Rmail files bigger and make Rmail slower.

My RMAIL file contains 5000 messages and is 286987559 bytes long.
Rmauk can read it and parse it in 3 seconds or so.  This is on a Thinkpad x200,
which is slow by current standards,

How long would it take to read and digest a Maildir on this machine?

Would it have to read each message when it starts up?  Or else, would
making a summary or searching thru messages have to read each message?

If you tell me about a mail user agent that uses Maildirs, and how I
could read my RMAIL file into one without changing anything, then if
that mail user agent is packaged in Trisquel, I could use it to
estimate what the speed of Rmail would be.

How would Rmail manage memory if these 5000 messages were in a
Maildir?  Would it keep only the current message in memory?  Would it
generate 5000 buffers at startup, once for each message?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)