From: Nicholas Van Weerdenburg <vanweerd@...>
Date: 2004-12-07T00:03:59+09:00
Subject: Re: SOT gmail invites

On Mon, 6 Dec 2004 21:43:47 +0900, Michal 'hramrach' Suchanek
<hramrach@centrum.cz> wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 04, 2004 at 08:04:50AM +0900, Adam Fabian wrote:
> 
> 
> > On Sat, Dec 04, 2004 at 07:55:32AM +0900, Jamis Buck wrote:
> > > For what it's worth, I tried mutt, once. I ran, screaming.
> > > (Metaphorically speaking.)
> >
> > My .muttrc is about 5k long.  I'd suggest you just start using it, and
> > when something strikes you as wrong or kludgy, read through the
> > documentation and look at .muttrc's to see how it could be done
> > better.  It really doesn't take very long before you've got a pretty
> > nice configuration that you wouldn't trade for any flashy GUI.
> 
> Sure, mutt is very configureble and has many nice features. And I am
> actually using it.
> The problem is it is slow. I would trade some extra features for fast
> access over slow lines, fast operation on large mailboxes, easy
> accessibility from anywhere.
> 
> My mutt setup uses crm114 and contains hundreds of megabytes of mail.
> It makes it qute non-portable. It must be at the source of the mail, so
> I have to connect through ssh which has poor performance over slower
> connection. Also ssh is unfortunately not the standard equipment yet
> (it is on everything but Windows).
> 
> Yet another problem with mutt is that it is not multithreaded (or does
> not use synchronization properly) so it is really slow when operating on
> mailboxes containing ~25k messages which do receive new mail.
> 
> At the first glance, gmail seems to solve the problem that made me
> store my mail on my hardrive in the first place - space. And it solves
> the problem that made me hate webmails - speed. All other webmails I
> tried were even slower than mutt on 25k mailbox over ssh :/
> 
> If I do not find any major gmail drawbacks I am going to move there :)
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Michal Suchanek
> 
> 

The speed is great. They make good use of dynamic html, and by
transacting in "conversations" instead of single emails, there isn't
that much wire traffic.

Nick