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Comment by jfmc | Hacker News Reader

I'm very happy with mbsync and mu4e. The only drawback is that email fetching+indexing can be very slow (10 to 30 seconds), compared with the instantaneous gmail web interface. I'm not sure if this is poor configuration on my side, or some other bottlenecks (mbsync, mu indexing, IMAP protocol).

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I'm not sure if the gmail interface is instantaneous or if it's just using tricks to make it seem that way.

I've regularly waited up to a minute for an email I've just sent to arrive on someone else's account. A large part of this delay seems to be for some weird undo feature they've added which you can no longer fully disable.

I've found the sequential syncing with mbsync to be a major bottleneck. These days instead of "mbsync -a" I have a script like this, using GNU Parallel:

    parallel --bar -j0 mbsync "$@" <<EOF
    mail1
    mail2
    mail3
    EOF

10-30 seconds sounds very slow indeed. It used to be slow for me (over 10 seconds against my university server), but I discovered it was because I had not deleted emails and propogated that to the server, I had only marked them for deletion (d), not deleted (D), and so there was some kind of syncing back and forth each time of quite many emails with mbsync. For me now it is always under 5 seconds for syncing and indexing, usually quicker.

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