Good email client to use with Dovecot?

[Robert Wolf]

On Fri, 18 Nov 2016, Steffen Kaiser wrote:

> On Fri, 18 Nov 2016, Tanstaafl wrote:
> > On 11/17/2016 10:58 AM, Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com> wrote:
> > > I have over 620K emails in over 1000 folders. This turns Thunderbird
> > > into an all day affair, just to refresh its caches.
> >
> > There are lots of knobs you can tweak to improve the situation, but the
> > bottom line is - 1,000 folders (really?!?), 650,000 emails - well...
> > this is going to be a problem for almost any client.
> 
> That is actually the area, in which a non-caching client (pine, mutt) is
> playing well, if there is a stable connection to the server.

*** Exactly! Alpine has no problem with this size. I have only 313 folders with 
about 825000 files/emails. Every action is done on server (dovecot). Alpine 
reads only that data, which alpine needs. For email index, alpine reads only 
the headers of the emails, which should be displayed on the screen. For opened 
email, alpine reads the content, but not whole email, but only the part which 
should be displayed. The attachment is downloaded only if you want do display 
or save it.

> Some time ago, I read an article about the following setup:
> 
> 1) external mail server - no matter which
> 2) local Dovecot and MTA - actually on some notebook or behind some slow link
> 3) a cron job that performs a two-way sync with the external server, if the
> link available
> 4) the user works locally only

*** Exactly this way I synchronize mail gmail and other freemail accounts to my 
server with dovecot using offlineimap and then accessing remotely or localy 
(from ssh) using alpine.


Regards,

Robert Wolf.