limit vm to last 5000 messages in imap folder?

[mere user]

hi Uday, hope you are having a relaxed and productive summer... with 23,000 messages in my gmail inbox, I find that emacs/ vm are having serious difficulties coping(*). I was wondering if would be possible to ask vm to only download/ manage the most recent 5000 messages or so? cheers, Eli

(*) standard emacs distributions, several I tried, just crash. using advice from a few developers (Yamamoto/ Zaretskii), I increased the stack depth by a factor of two: newlim = (re_max_failures * ratio + 200000)*2; and now instead of crashing emacs just occasionally hangs up for up to a minute or two at a time when I try to use vm, so it's usable but not efficient nor fun. I delete my attachments every once in a while, so I think the issue is not a large mailbox but a large number of messages.

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

Yes, 5000 messages is about the limit of what VM can reasonably handle.

Can you remind me how you manage your vm/gmail setup?

[mere user (emacs-user)]

thanks for the prompt response... I use vm as the imap client for gmail.
 was that the question?

On Sun, Jun 22, 2014 at 10:23 AM, Uday Reddy <email address hidden>
wrote:

> Yes, 5000 messages is about the limit of what VM can reasonably handle.
>
> Can you remind me how you manage your vm/gmail setup?
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to the bug
> report.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1332908
>
> Title:
> limit vm to last 5000 messages in imap folder?
>
> Status in VM (View Mail) for Emacs:
> New
>
> Bug description:
> hi Uday, hope you are having a relaxed and productive summer... with
> 23,000 messages in my gmail inbox, I find that emacs/ vm are having
> serious difficulties coping(*). I was wondering if would be possible
> to ask vm to only download/ manage the most recent 5000 messages or
> so? cheers, Eli
>
>
> (*) standard emacs distributions, several I tried, just crash. using
> advice from a few developers (Yamamoto/ Zaretskii), I increased the stack
> depth by a factor of two: newlim = (re_max_failures * ratio + 200000)*2;
> and now instead of crashing emacs just occasionally hangs up for up to a
> minute or two at a time when I try to use vm, so it's usable but not
> efficient nor fun. I delete my attachments every once in a while, so I
> think the issue is not a large mailbox but a large number of messages.
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/vm/+bug/1332908/+subscriptions
>

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

Eli, "IMAP folders" were designed so that they represent a mirror of what is on the server. So, if there 23K messages on the server, all of them would have to be present in the IMAP folder too. Doing anything else would be too complicated. Here are a couple of ideas for you:

- You should have been using headers-only messages for IMAP (also called "external messages"). They are described in the "Starting up" section of the manual. If you haven't been using them, please do.

- You can cut down the size of the INBOX on the server by archiving messages. Go to the first message in the folder and do
        ESC-1000 M-x vm-imap-save-message-to-imap-folder RET <folder-name> RET
and VM will ask gmail to archive 1000 messages. You should do this in little bits at a time, because gmail is really slow in doing archiving. Don't know why.

I will think of ways to reduce the amount of space taken up by messages. But all those things will still need you to control the size of the INBOX because we will never be able to match the resources of the gmail servers.

[mere user (emacs-user)]

thanks! what I've been doing recently is use emacs to access the starred/
flagged folder of gmail directly instead of teh inbox or sent mail folders/
labels. this folder has only a few tens of emails in my case, and this way
I can work with these emails within emacs. so I now use a combination of
emacs/ gmail...

On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 6:49 PM, Uday Reddy <email address hidden> wrote:

> Eli, "IMAP folders" were designed so that they represent a mirror of
> what is on the server. So, if there 23K messages on the server, all of
> them would have to be present in the IMAP folder too. Doing anything
> else would be too complicated. Here are a couple of ideas for you:
>
> - You should have been using headers-only messages for IMAP (also called
> "external messages"). They are described in the "Starting up" section
> of the manual. If you haven't been using them, please do.
>
> - You can cut down the size of the INBOX on the server by archiving
> messages. Go to the first message in the folder and do
> ESC-1000 M-x vm-imap-save-message-to-imap-folder RET <folder-name>
> RET
> and VM will ask gmail to archive 1000 messages. You should do this in
> little bits at a time, because gmail is really slow in doing archiving.
> Don't know why.
>
> I will think of ways to reduce the amount of space taken up by messages.
> But all those things will still need you to control the size of the
> INBOX because we will never be able to match the resources of the gmail
> servers.
>
>
> ** Changed in: vm
> Status: New => Triaged
>
> ** Changed in: vm
> Importance: Undecided => Wishlist
>
> ** Changed in: vm
> Assignee: (unassigned) => Uday Reddy (reddyuday)
>
> ** Changed in: vm
> Milestone: None => 8.2.2
>
> ** Tags added: imap
>
> ** Tags added: headers-only
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to the bug
> report.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1332908
>
> Title:
> limit vm to last 5000 messages in imap folder?
>
> Status in VM (View Mail) for Emacs:
> Triaged
>
> Bug description:
> hi Uday, hope you are having a relaxed and productive summer... with
> 23,000 messages in my gmail inbox, I find that emacs/ vm are having
> serious difficulties coping(*). I was wondering if would be possible
> to ask vm to only download/ manage the most recent 5000 messages or
> so? cheers, Eli
>
>
> (*) standard emacs distributions, several I tried, just crash. using
> advice from a few developers (Yamamoto/ Zaretskii), I increased the stack
> depth by a factor of two: newlim = (re_max_failures * ratio + 200000)*2;
> and now instead of crashing emacs just occasionally hangs up for up to a
> minute or two at a time when I try to use vm, so it's usable but not
> efficient nor fun. I delete my attachments every once in a while, so I
> think the issue is not a large mailbox but a large number of messages.
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/vm/+bug/1332908/+subscriptions
>