Bad Signature - Both Roundcube and Squirrelmail webmail cannot search for anything + cannot open many emails because there are more than 200, 000 emails in my Inbox

[Joseph Tam]

On Tue, 19 Apr 2022, Sami Ketola wrote:

>>> In practice, though, Gmail used to exhibit search/browse bugs (e.g.
>>> failing to identify all relevant mails/threads) annoyingly often.  This
>>> was sometimes true via the official Gmail web interface, and was
>>> especially true via the official mobile app, on at least some platforms.
>>
>> They are also losing/deleting messages.  I have had several occassions
>> where I send a message and my delivering server registered the Sent
>> status of the gmail server and it just disappeared.
>
> This is more about gmail ?spam protection?.  Gmail filters emails after
> accepting them with secret criteria and sometimes the email ends up in
> spam folder and sometime it is just silently deleted.

While Gmail's spam classifcation is frustratingly opaque (as with many
other providers), there's one other weirdness that can make messages
dissappear: when you send from Gmail through a forwarder back to the
same Gmail account.

The mail will be accepted, but not appear in your INBOX.  This is either
some labelling weirdness (cannot be labelled as both INBOX and Sent) or
maybe an anti-loop protection.  This causes confusion when Gmail users
test their mail forwarding I set up for them.

However, we're truly off-topic: my point was that Gmail users get a
distorted sense of how most mail systems work (mailbox operations scale
with message count), as they get brainwashed into the "Gmail" way of
doing things.  A relevant question is whether you can use Dovecot's
virtual mailbox feature to define a catch-all virtual mailbox to placate
these users which won't bring an imap process to its knees.

Joseph Tam <jtam.home at gmail.com>