Avoiding the "huge INBOX of death"

[David Bremner]

Raphaël Fournier-S'niehotta <raphael at raphaelfournier.net> writes:

> Hello fellow notmuchers,
>
> I am a longtime "classic" mutt user, willing to switch to a notmuch-based
> solution (probably neomutt). However, as far as I understand, I will have to
> deal with a "huge INBOX of death", as put by Anarcat in a recent blog post [1],
> that when all emails remain in a single maildir, which may the become very
> large. 
>

TBH, I don't understand what specific problem anarcat is having, it
sounds like a workflow issue.  I currently have 1074 messages tagged
inbox, out of about 450K messages.

Notmuch doesn't care how you organize your mail files on disk, as long
as they are one message per file, and one tree of messages. So feel free
to store them e.g. by date using procmail if you are worried about
performance, or in some other set of folders with semantic 

For performance I'd also say measure before you optimize. I currently
have about 77K messages in one of my maildirs, with no noticable
performance hit.  Of course you want e.g. directory indexing on ext3,
but that is default on anything recent.

> Thus, I think I need to have my emails sorted into maildir folders according to
> the notmuch tags. Namely, emails with the "inbox" tag should stay in the INBOX
> maildir, those with "archive" should be moved to Archives (all synchronized with
> the server). As a bonus, it would be great to have a few more features, like
> "mails in Archives older than 6 months are moved to Archives/<year>" (kept
> locally and not stored on the server).

Generally, you should search directly by folder, rather than trying to
sync tags and folders.

I'm not familiar with afew as a user.

d


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