Hacker News Reader

Comment by petre | Hacker News Reader

You haven't used it with imap and lots of mail then. I get 100…500 emails daily and tb freezes for 15…60 seconds at a time. My inbox is kept in order by a bunch of filters, but the thing still freezes if I have lots of e-mails in another mailbox.

The mailboxes are very inefficient, being regular mboxes with an index. I'd rather have the e-mails in a sqlite database. A Maildir on disk is a waste of inodes and a liability when one does a search or archives the thing. Old mail is rarely touched and sqlite has a full text search function.

The interface is okay. Quirky, dated but okay. I just need a snooze option like Gmail's but one that doesn't hide the e-mail. Now I have to convert the e-mail to a task and add an alarm to the task which requires a lot of clicks and setting options that are unergonomic.

View on HN

>You haven't used it with imap and lots of mail then. I get 100…500 emails daily and tb freezes for 15…60 seconds at a time. My inbox is kept in order by a bunch of filters, but the thing still freezes if I have lots of e-mails in another mailbox.

I do, around 100k mails in various dirs with order of magnitude higher volume than you. Just need to set it up

> The mailboxes are very inefficient, being regular mboxes with an index. I'd rather have the e-mails in a sqlite database. A Maildir on disk is a waste of inodes and a liability when one does a search or archives the thing. Old mail is rarely touched and sqlite has a full text search function.

You can set it to maildir style, sadly impossible after account creation and requires unbelievably much effort for such simple change.

Like, this piece of shit asked me to restart client to change IMAP server name, who wrote that garbage?

Out of curiosity: We're talking "magnitude higher", so that means 1k to 5k mails each day.

How do you cope with that? Given a work day has 8 hours, you'll have at best 30 seconds to process an email (480 working minutes for 1000 mails) and that includes reading, answering and doing the actual work required to have an answer. That seems like not manageable?

I get several thousand emails a day but only a handful require reading or response.

Many are just notifications from GitHub from 7-year-ago employers since leaving an org does not (did not?) unsubscribe you.

Others are build logs which are useful to keep around for searching and so forth.

Typically I just let my mail provider sort them for me.

I was using thunderbird with the same very large accounts on Linux and windows.

For some reason on Linux it was fine in Windows it was literally unusable. Particularly when composing a message of all things.

There’s definitely some quirks somewhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com