GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 212064
Getting new messages using POP3 can be slow if mail kept on server
Last modified: 2005-11-15 02:22:21 UTC
Please fill in this template when reporting a bug, unless you know what you are doing. Description of Problem: Every since Evolution 0.13, the mail client has been very slow downloading messages from the server if the server has a large number of messages. For those of us that keep 5500 messages on the server it makes any newer version than 0.12 unusable. Steps to reproduce the problem: 1. Create 5000 messages (hell, 200 is enough) 2. Try to check mail 3. Wait for 30 minutes till done Actual Results: Mail is eventually received, but only after much frustration. How often does this happen? Everytime. Additional Information: What going on is evolution seems to want to scan the head of every message everytime it gets new mail. For 5000 messages this is an unacceptable cost. The offending code is the pop3_generate_uids() in camel/providers/pop3/camel-pop3-folder.c, invoked from pop3_refresh_info().
the only reason that it downloading the headers is because other than that, there is no way for evolution to decide that it has already downloaded the message. If your pop server supported UIDL, then it would be much faster. Unfortunately, without UIDL we have no choice but to download all the headers to md5 sum them and compare against previously downloaded header md5 sums.