Something like DayLite by Market Circle?

[Ashley Aitken]

On 15/08/2007, at 12:39 AM, LuKreme wrote:

> On Aug 13, 2007, at 12:01 PM, Jason Slack wrote:
>>  in total i have about 7GB or mail.
>>
>> I am frustrated with e-mail programs as then cannot accomodate  
>> this much
>> e-mail with out delays and sluggishness and un-reliability.
>
> I've used Apple Mail, Thunderbird, and Eudora under similar loads (5 
> + GB of email) and all have preformed quite well.  The secret is to  
> not keep it all in on folder, or even in a few folders.  I spread  
> out my 5GB of email over a couple of hundred folders.

I think this really *is* the secret, i.e. use folders, lots of folders.

Can anyone tell me any reason why Apple Mail (or most other email  
apps that don't use one big database) wouldn't scale well using lots  
of folders?    Of course, the beauty of  Apple Mail (and some others)  
is that, if need be, you can view a hierarchy of folders as a single  
folder (i.e. it combines all the results).

Sure having one folder with 100,000 emails will be slow but why would  
100 folders with 1000 emails be slow?  Each folder is separate in a  
lot of ways.  Of course, it may take the application longer to scan  
through all the folders when it has to synchronise, but that's would  
just be linear scaling.

Now I believe Kreme uses procmail to sort his email into many folders  
but that's probably out of reach of most people.  So I guess what  
Apple Mail (and similiar email programs) need is a way to  
automatically partition emails into automatically generated folders  
when the folders reach a certain size.

Of course, once the number of folders becomes ridiculously high new  
problems may arise.

Alternatively, since most emails come from mailing lists which are  
usually archived on-line one can just delete mailing list emails  
after a while, which is what I am now trying to do.   It's even  
possible to do this with rules (e.g. delete emails older than 3  
months in a particular folder).

Cheers,
Ashley.

--
Ashley Aitken
Perth, Western Australia
mrhatken at mac dot com
Skype Name: MrHatken (GMT + 8 Hours!)