2 code change requests: FETCH instead of UID FETCH and using IMAP 'ID' at login time

Marc MERLIN marc at merlins.org
Mon Aug 8 16:16:31 BST 2011


On Mon, Aug 08, 2011 at 05:09:48PM +0200, Sebastian Spaeth wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Jul 2011 16:19:56 -0700, Marc MERLIN <marc at merlins.org> wrote:
> > I was told the following:
> > "Also, it looks like offlineimap is using UID FETCH, which means that                                      
> > after every fetch, we check and update the folder information if any                                      
> > changes have been made.  This means you pay a performance penalty                                         
> > every time you receive a message or mark a message as read or                                             
> > whatever.  You would get more consistent performance using plain                                          
> > FETCH. "
> > 
> > Is it possible to change the code to use just FETCH instead?
> 
> This is interesting information. Looking at the IMAP RFCs I don't see
> any information about checkpointing and updating when using UID vs
> FETCH, so this must be some implementation specific issues, I guess. You
> were saying that you are using gmail for that?
 
?Yes

> The problem is that the FETCH command takes a message sequence number
> and these can change for every new SELECT of a folder. The UID command
> takes the Message UID (which never changes) as its argument which makes
> much more sense for us (as this is how we keep track of messages). So
> using the FETCH command would require us to make lots of changes and
> auditing to: 1) additionally gather the message sequence number of a
> message when selecting it and 2) make sure we never re-select a folder
> before we make use of it and 3) we use exactly the same thread to
> download a mail as has been used to gather the message sequence
> number. Overall, I am a bit sceptical that all this would be implemented quickly.

That's fair. It was given to me as a way to decrease imap bw needs and
increase sync speed, but since it's not a trivial change, never mind.

> Also, try to use the sqlite status backend rather than the plain text
> one. For many emails and lots of syncs I would suspect it makes quite
> some difference.

Will do.
(although it seemed that I was being slowed down by gmail and not by my
side).

Thanks,
Marc
-- 
"A mouse is a device used to point at the xterm you want to type in" - A.S.R.
Microsoft is to operating systems ....
                                      .... what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking
Home page: http://marc.merlins.org/  
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