[Dovecot] More effective mailbox fetching over high RTT link

[Timo Sirainen]

On Sun, 2009-08-09 at 22:20 +0200, Andrzej Adam Filip wrote:
> Could you offer some suggestion how to fetch mailbox content over 
> high RTT link (with negligible packet loss)?
> 
> Currently I use IMAP+IDLE *but* it fails to use full available bandwidth
> due to high RTT and "send command wait for response" nature of POP3 and
> IMAP4 protocols.

I'm not entirely sure what you want. Download all new messages
automatically whenever they show up? And by "mailbox" do you mean "user"
or "folder"? So would you want to download all new mails in all folders?
And is it ok to create your own software to do the downloading?

If all of them were "yes", the best you could right now would be to set
up a virtual "all" mailbox containing all mailboxes. Then in IDLE you'd
see whenever new messages pop up and then issue FETCH n:* BODY.PEEK[] or
whatever. There's also IMAP NOTIFY extension that would allow your
client to ask server to immediately send the message body instead of the
client having to ask for it. But Dovecot doesn't currently support that.

Or if you just always wanted to download all mails, again a virtual
mailbox and FETCH 1:* BODY.PEEK[] gives you all mails.
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