Limiting the number (by date) of IMAP headers fetched in mutt

imapmutt

I'm using mutt to open an IMAP folder (gmail) that has a lot of messages (hundreds of thousands), so I'd like to tell mutt to fetch only messages less than 1 week old (for example), since fetching headers for all of them takes several minutes (or more).

After googling the problem for hours, I haven't found any answers that would help (one suggestion to cache headers helped somewhat by reducing the time from dozens of minutes to single digit minutes, but it's still slow).

It sounds to me like this is in principle an easy problem to solve, but I don't know how; any help would be greatly appreciated.

Best Answer

Mutt or Neomutt doesn't support this behaviour now. Dealing with large mailboxes isn't always easy.

There are tools to sync emails to your local mailboxes that support what you want.

imapsync supports the functionality you need with --maxage option.

offilneimap does similar with configuration option maxage

Why to bother with options above when you already need to configure imap-to-mailbox synchronization tool? So I would stick with syncing them all.

There are benefits of having messges localy:

working with large mailboxes is fast (OK, I still need header cache to load ~46000 msgs in 3-4 seconds)
search and view messages offline
easily backup all your e-mails
doesn't consume too much space. In my case 46692 msgs = 3414 MB.

GMail support limiting IMAP access to last ### messages (based on count, not age). Maybe some other e-mail providers has solution you want. But then you're dependent on a specific provider.

Manual syncing

Try $:

$         sync-mailbox         save changes to mailbox

Automatic syncing?

You can't make mutt do that automatically/periodically, by design. The reasoning, as I understand it, is that it might lead to data loss. E.g., when you mark something as deleted, you'd normally be able to undo, and auto-syncing would interfere with that (see Re: Auto sync-mailbox - no way! and Mutt, IMAP and auto'refresh').

Mailboxes should be synced in any case when you change folders/mailboxes.

Alternatives

There's a source patch adding a timeout-hook to mutt you could use to periodically call sync-mailbox, but it's for mutt 1.5.9 and I don't know if it can be applied against the current version.

You could also set up OfflineIMAP (or isync). It's designed for synchronizing local mailbox(es) with a central IMAP one. You can then use another notification system (like e.g. mutt's built-in one or mail-notification etc.) to watch your local box for changes.

Mutt: automatically fetch remote IMAP folder list

There is an option for your config file:

imap_check_subscribed
       Type: boolean
       Default: no

       When set, mutt will fetch the set of subscribed folders from
       your server on connection, and add them to the set of mailboxes
       it polls for new mail just as if you had issued individual
       “mailboxes” commands.

Of course this only works for subscribed folders and only after your first connection to the server.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Mutt seems to sync to Gmail IMAP only on quit

Manual syncing

Automatic syncing?

Alternatives

Mutt: automatically fetch remote IMAP folder list

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