Re: faster new mail check

[Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon@esys.ca>]

> > Well, I'm interested in all of them.  I want to know when new messages
> > arrive in any of these groups, but it takes >30 seconds to select and
> > fetch in each one.
> 
> If you are interested in all of them then you have to wait while it
> checks for new messages, except....
> 
>   o You could switch to using STATUS and not SELECT/FETCH.  This is is
>     already an option if you use nnimap-group-list-speed set to
>     'medium.  Note that the only negative thing about doing this is
>     that the lowest article number is assumed to be 1.  The max is
>     correct.  This should be faster.

I haven't had a chance to dig into the guts of the nnimap code yet, so
excuse a potentially silly question, but ...

Can nnimap (or emacs for that matter) handle talking to more than one
network connection at a time? If so, you might want to look at a
notification protocol I'm currently designing. There have been ongoing
discussions on the IMAP mailing list about how to handle monitoring
mulitple IMAP mailboxes for new mail. What I've cooked up is a simple
notification protocol that lets a client monitor arrivals for several
mailboxes over a single TCP connection to a notification server. As the
notifications arrive the client can use a second, single, IMAP connection
to SELECT or EXAMINE the mailboxes of interest.

I'm a couple of days away from completing the first cut of the protocol
draft. If there's interest I can post copies of it here when it's done.

--lyndon