[wplug] Anyone Wanna Try A New Email Client?

[Rob Knapp]

> On Tue, 2007-09-11 at 07:29 -0400, Rob Knapp wrote: 
> > At any rate I'm trying to keep this initial roll out slow. The code 
> > is GPL'd so I'm not going to trying get all NDA-ish but just ask 
> > nicely that you chose to limit who you share it with. 
> 
> Understood. You might want to put this near the top of your messages. 
> 
Yeah, that was silly of me.  :)


> (I know, I have the same problem if being wordy and people don't always 
> read such statements. Not everyone is like me and takes the time to 
> read your whole message just like they don't mine either. ;) 
> 
> > All communication gets written to a database, so you can do search on 
> > all the content. Also, if you go into the calendar component and open 
> > a time slot all emails/IM/irc's that you received in that time frame 
> > appear in addtion to iCal events. 
> 
> Now this is a really "neat spin of various solutions" for a good set of 
> common problems. That right there is why I want to try it myself! 
> 

Thanks, its been brewing at the back of my mind for a long time.  I remember starting work on something like it back when I got my first BeOS disks (the last release that PowerPC only)! :)

> Also, what DB are you using and what kind of size 
> constraints/limitations are you running into? 
> 

Right now I'm working with SQLite, with plans to offer a msyql or postgres version in the future.  (If I do that, I might implement it as a RESTFUL api so that I can still access my emails when traveling, without setting up a VPN :) )

The db for my main account has 37.425 messages, with an additional 20K or so coming from other accounts.  (Basically all emails between Jan 1 and now). That DB totals about 530 Megs, sqlite claims to be able to handle dbs "smaller than 10s of gigs"... so I haven't hit their limit yet.  The main issues I've run into is that that my biggest tag has about 30K messages in it (the python user mailing list).  There is about a 2-3 second delay when I click on that tag, and about a 6-10 second delay when I click on "All".  (This is only if I view all messages, when viewing only new messages, everything is immediate.)  Doing a search accross all emails takes about 10-20 seconds... so there is a lot of room 
for improvement!

I've profiled the code, and it appears that the biggest delay is in actually retrieving the records, so a more robust db solution might be required for really big repositories.  (Or my db indeces are wrong...which is possible.)

The other issue (and this might affect you) is that the intial import of messages from the server can take some time.  (About 20 minutes for 8K mails last time I checked.)  After that things are pretty swift, though.  [Also there is currently no support for importing from an existing maildir or mbox repository...I simply haven't written it yet.]

> I myself kill Mozilla my amount of e-mail, and Evolution only works well 
> if I use IMAP (and even then its local indicies are rather big). 
> 

Yeah, i was starting to hit the same problem before I started work on this.... they each have about a couple hundred thousand emails dating back to 2004.

> > Spam filtering is provided by spambayes on windows and bogofilter on 
> > mac/linux. 
> > Spell check is provided by aspell if you have it installed and on your 
> > path. 
> 
> That's really a sweet and complete touch. Nice job on usability all 
> around from what I saw in the video. 
> 

Thanks!

> > So: what do you need for it to run? 
> > Python 2.5+ 
> > PyQt4.2+ 
> > [These are part of the windows installer...] 
> > That's pretty much it... the installer contains all the other 
> > libraries you need. 
> > On Windows: download Setup.exe and run it 
> > On Linux: download MrUCC-0.1-py2.5.egg, unzip and run "sudo python 
> > setup.py install" this will install mrucc where ever your python bin 
> > is installed. 
> > Mac: The Mac app bundle is not quite ready yet, so I'm not uploading 
> > it. 
> 
> I'll have to try this the weekend if I get time, or maybe I'll just 
> "make time." ;) 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Bryan J. Smith Professional, Technical Annoyance 
> mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org http://thebs413.blogspot.com 
> -------------------------------------------------------- 
> Fission Power: An Inconvenient Solution 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________ 
> wplug mailing list 
> wplug at wplug.org 
> http://www.wplug.org/mailman/listinfo/wplug 
>