Re: [VM] Accessing large IMAP folders

[Uday Reddy]

Dear Stefan,

If you use any of the pre-releases of VM 8.2.0 or the trunk on Launchpad,
there are ways of maintaining IMAP cache folders with only message headers
loaded and message bodies maintained externally.

In the latest pre-release (8.2.0b), you do this by setting

   (setq vm-enable-external-messages '(imap))
   (setq vm-imap-max-message-size 1000)  ; download small messages by default

You can also set the max-message-size to 0, in which case no message bodies
will be downloaded by default.

I envisage that, down the road, we will make external-message feature work
for other modes of remote access as well, e.g., POP, maildir etc.

To get rid of the message bodies that are already downloaded, you can use
`O' (vm-unload-message).  You can mark the messages that you want to unload
and then do `M N O'.

Cheers,
Uday

Stefan Monnier writes:

> My IMAP folders tend to be large (like 500M for the most important
> ones).  VM seems to have serious trouble with such large folders.
> Is there any tricks we can play, short of shrinking those folders?
> 
> I guess part of the issue is that VM keeps the whole folder in an Emacs
> buffer and that Emacs isn't very good at handling really large buffers,
> but I'd like a solution that doesn't add work to the Emacs maintainers ;-)
> 
> 
>         Stefan
> 
> 
>