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Comment by preek | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: How is it that GMail is perceived faster than a locally running MUA like mu4e which is quoted in the article?

I'm actually using mu4e for exactly this reason: It's so much faster than any web client could ever be. And I'm saying this as a professional web dev^^ And yeah, I know GMail - I was an early adopter and have seen two companies migrate to it in the last five years.

Of course, running mail within Emacs has its additional awesome benefits, but that's a different kind of argument I'll leave out for now. I'm honestly curious why people think/believe/know that GMail is faster than a well engineered locally indexed app. It just doesn't seem to be the case for me, but I hear this time and time again.

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If your mu4e is backed by a maildir on disk then it's pretty much assured to be slower than gmail or fastmail. One disk seek is very very expensive, and for many people a round trip to gmail's frontends is going to be faster. Gmail's speed will remain constant no matter how busy your local disk is. If you're compiling firefox on the same single disk that stores your mail, mu4e is going to take multiple seconds just to go to the next thread.

On the other hand if you have a good SSD then a local MUA running from local storage can look competitive.

> If you're compiling firefox on the same single disk that stores your mail, mu4e is going to take multiple seconds just to go to the next thread.

I don't know what kind of machine you're using, but that's not true for any CPU/disk from the last 8 years or so.

There's no way of answering this without people perceiving that I am "attacking" mu4e.

Let's just say that mu4e gets its efficiency from memorisation (e.g. hotkeys) and a quirky way of working ("all organisation is a query"). Gmail and FastMail get their efficiency from standard UI elements that most computer users will already know how to use, and discoverability is via UI elements not manpages.

mu4e undeniably has a maximum higher speed. But you'll spend a lot of time fighting the tool until you reach that nirvana.

I've been using mutt for a few years before switching to gmail and finally to FastMail. Once you learn the keyboard shortcuts (https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6594?hl=en or https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/kbshortcuts.html) I wasn't really slower than using mutt locally. Since they are both single page apps you can't "outrun" them by using shortcuts too fast. It works pretty well for me.

Some MUAs are pretty slow. It isn't hard to do better than a few of the MUAs I've used, and webmail often is better just because more people use them so more optimization has gone into them. I think this is the main one.

Webmail often has a really fast pipe to the email storage, which means it can get the headers faster and then extract only the parts it needs. Webmail is not required to use IMAP (though many do) an optimized protocol can offer advantages.

I wanted to get this setup going a while back but I'm usually stuck on Windows for most of the day. I got Bash on Windows setup this weekend and I think I'm going to give it another shot.

Nevermind, bash on windows sucks for Emacs. The very first thing I tried to do was set a mark (c-space) and it doesn't work. Maybe there's a workaround but it's just not worth the effort. I'll get myself 100% on Linux one of these days :/

> Nevermind, bash on windows sucks for Emacs. The very first thing I tried to do was set a mark (c-space) and it doesn't work. Maybe there's a workaround but it's just not worth the effort.

https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/639

I haven't found a workaround yet and still use Linux VMs for a lot of tasks.

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