On 4/19/2022 5:12 PM, Turritopsis Dohrnii Teo En Ming wrote:
It is not true that no email system was ever designed for 200,000 or more emails.
If I did not remember wrongly, more than 10 years ago, I used to have a Gmail email account, with 4-5 MILLION email messages in the Inbox. There was no problem searching even though I had 4-5 MILLION email messages in the Inbox.
If you were using either a Google app or the gmail.com website to access that inbox, then it doesn't compare. I really doubt that either of those uses the IMAP protocol. They would be using something proprietary that is highly optimized for the way that Google stores data and leverages the enormous amounts of computing power that they maintain.
I would bet that if you accessed a gmail folder with 5 million messages in it using IMAP, you would have similar problems with it to those that have been described here in this thread. IMAP is a beautiful protocol, but I don't think it was designed for handling that many messages.
Thanks, Shawn