#181 Opening a folder containing 5000+ emails is quite slow... Option to limit number visible?
I've used SimpleMail for a long time, and now have quite a few folders with 5000 or more emails in them (and two folders with over 10,000!). Even on an X1000 it can take quite a few seconds to open such folders, which is an annoyance & disincentive to open the folder (i.e. avoiding using SimpleMail).
I realise this isn't simple to solve, but I have a few ideas:
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Allow users to limit how many emails are actually visible in the folder, such that it simply doesn't show the oldest emails. Crude but effective, although this raises the question of how users could (temporarily) view older emails when they occasionally need to...
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I've just noticed that once I've opened a big slow folder, if I come back to it later it seems to open very quick (as if it cached the last visit). So would it be possible to "pre-cache" those folders, either at start-up, or as a background process (on folders the user is NOT currently viewing), or perhaps even save that cached data on disk (e.g. FolderSync2 takes ages to scan a disk, but it can save that scan to a file & then load that file MUCH MUCH quicker than the original scan took)?
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Or how giving a time limit when opening a folder (say 1 second), and if it takes longer than that, then just show the emails you've got at that moment, BUT ALSO continue scanning that folder in the background, adding them to the list as they are found (I guess in small batches). This would be the most complex solution, since it would involve updating the MUI list that the user is currently viewing, so I guess you might not want to go that route...
Personally I think idea "2" (using a background scanning process on the folders the user is NOT currently looking at) seems like a decent compromise - probably not TOO complex to implement, but should give most of speed that you'd get with idea "3". OTOH, there you probably have bigger fish (problems) to fry (solve).