[maemo-developers] Modest/TinyMail problems (continue from the blog comments)

[From: Philip Van Hoof]

On Sat, 2008-06-28 at 19:51 +0200, Luca Olivetti wrote:
> En/na Luca Olivetti ha escrit:
> > En/na Dave Cridland ha escrit:
> > 
> >> Tinymail is good - if Luca upgrades his IMAP server to Cyrus 2.3, he'll 
> >> see a big speed increase from both Modest and Polymer, I think.
> > 
> > I'm too old for that, now I stick with whatever version comes with the 
> > distro.
> 

> BTW, after flashing diablo, I tried modest again, and I'm sorry to say 
> that it's till unusable for me.
> The biggest problem is that it cannot cope with big folders (e.g. I have 
> one that has ~26000 messages) and that's after receiving all headers, it 
> is slightly better with a ~12000 messages folder.
> Besides, it has no threading, no "view next unread" button, no "mark 
> thread read", no "mark folder read" and no "show only new messages" 
> option (or at least I couldn't find them).

Sizes above 10,000 items are not supported by Modest. Tinymail can
handle such folders relatively well (if you use the demo-ui), but Modest
does a bunch of sorting operations that makes those sizes unusable slow
indeed.

We know which areas (blocks of code) are responsible for the slowdown
and we can point people to possible optimizations.

Among them are the summary store in Tinymail, order of retrieval (which
influences the amount of sorting needed by Modest. Rob Taylor is
planning to work on this at Guadec too, by the way), sorting itself,
storing sort results, making integer values of strings and store these
so that those can be compared instead of having to compare strings while
sorting, etc etc etc.

During the development of Modest there was, however, relatively low
priority given to supporting really large folders.

About the threading we have discussed this on this mailing list, so you
can read in this discussion-thread the possibilities and POV being
taken. One of the conclusions is that a fully threaded view wastes too
much screen space. Most people just need grouping "discussions", so that
is one possibility indeed. Again we can point people to how to make this
work (and are some people already doing small experiments too).

About the buttons that you would like, the software is opensource and
the features that you describe are all relatively easy to implement. For
Modest we had a strict UI & requirements document that didn't include
your features. Nonetheless would your code that implements them speak
loader than E-mails.

So I can only recommend checking out the code and trying to implement
them. Perhaps provide a plugin-system so that in case Nokia's UI team
decides not to accept your UI enhancements, you can still ship plugins
that enable the features.

If you do, get in touch with the Modest maintainers and developers

hint: you can for example find most of them on the Tinymail mailing
list.

http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/tinymail-devel-list


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
http://pvanhoof.be/blog
http://codeminded.be