Bug#443259: libmail-box-perl: mail::box is practically unusable on large folders

[Celejar]

Package: libmail-box-perl
Version: 2.073-1
Severity: normal

I have a (MH) folder containing about 30000 mails.  Merely opening it
seems to require about 50 MB.  This would be tolerable, if unpleasant,
but I find that browsing through the messages causes memory usage to
steadily skyrocket (I haven't let it get past about 600 MB, since my system only
has 512, and it's brought to its knees by this).  AFAICT, each message
is kept in memory once read and parsed (I see this even when setting
"extract => 'LAZY'").  Is this correct, and if so is there any way to
tell mail::box to release the memory after reading a message?

I'm a perl newbie, so although I did read the docs carefully, I may be
making a bad mistake, but I did confirm that exactly the same problem occurs
when running the 'chewmail' mail archiver on my mail folders (chewmail
uses mail::box to interface with mail folders.

This behavior makes using mail::box intolerable on large folders, so I
have to switch to email::simple until this is resolved.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.22-lizzie
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages libmail-box-perl depends on:
ii  libdigest-hmac-perl        1.01-6        create standard message integrity 
ii  libfile-remove-perl        0.37-1        remove files and directories, acce
ii  libio-stringy-perl         2.110-2       Perl5 modules for IO from scalars 
ii  libmailtools-perl          1.77-1        Manipulate email in perl programs
ii  libmime-types-perl         1.21-1        Perl extension for determining MIM
ii  libobject-realize-later-pe 0.18-1        Delayed creation of objects
ii  libtimedate-perl           1.1600-9      Time and date functions for Perl
ii  liburi-perl                1.35.dfsg.1-1 Manipulates and accesses URI strin
ii  libuser-identity-perl      0.92-1        manages different identities/roles
ii  perl                       5.8.8-8       Larry Wall's Practical Extraction 
ii  perl-base [libscalar-list- 5.8.8-8       The Pathologically Eclectic Rubbis

libmail-box-perl recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information