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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

> my inbox only has 17k mails in it

I can't tell if you're intentionally joking or are actually unaware of that being maybe a little much.

Is it much? I have around 120k emails in my inbox. macOS Mail.app opens it in a jiffy. Computers are supposed to be fast nowadays.

It shouldn’t be. IMAP doesn’t have to download all of them.

Oh, that's fair. I was questioning the reasonableness of having 17k emails but you're right, the software should be able to support it.

Oh, it's a nonsense, definitely, but it only gets cleaned out every 6 months or thereabouts and I've not yet translated the rules in my cleaning script to Sieve rules to do it automatically.

What are you doing with your old emails? Do you delete them? Or have you found a method to archive them that produces few folders with few emails in each and that works consistently over the decades?

Because I haven't, and having everything in one folder works just fine with the clients I use.

I use two folders, inbox (currently active mails, also sent ones) and trash, which is the ever growing pile of mails.

Most importantly is the use of a mail indexer (notmuch currently) for searching and getting virtual mailbox viewes.

I delete e-mails the moment I don't need them anymore.

Right now, on my main mail, I have ~400 mails in Trash, but only 10 in Inbox and Archive + another dozen in Sent.

I sometimes wish to find emails that I couldn't have known I would need again.

Right now, I've been looking for the email address of the landlord of the house I lived in until 2009. I'm happy that I didn't remove his email saying that his son would come on Friday to fix the door handle.

Hm. I just checked and my ~/Mail/inbox has 1.38 million messages.

That doesn't include most mailing lists, because those are sorted into their own separate folders using procmail.

I use Neomutt with Notmuch, btw. It generally loads in a fraction of a second.

I used to try to keep on top of mail. I don't any more.

It really shouldn't be too much. It's not the 80s.

The same letters slapped into SQLite the most brute way would work (and perform better), so why the embarrassing slowdown?

I have 93,000 emails in my mail spool, and it opens in Pine in about 30 seconds on a 1 GHz AlphaServer, even when lots of other stuff is running at the same time.

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