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Thunderbird Tagging
January 10th, 2006UPDATE: Thunderbird Tagging Extension - A proposal for IMAP and POP based tagging in Thunderbird.
Apple Mail Is Busted
I’ve been toying with e-mail today. The day is gone. I’m only a step closer to where I want to be.
I want to be able to search my mail. The Apple Mail client is pitifully slow when it searches an IMAP account. I can’t find any information on how to make it work faster.
It wants to mirror all my mail on my laptop, so it can index and search that using Spotlight. Fine. If only it worked. It takes thirty seconds to get a positive response when searching a mailbox that contains a single message. Hopeless.
Any help in this regard is appreciated.
Apple Mail Has Cool Add Ons
I’m a sad Mac user today. I wanted to start tagging my email using MailTags 1.1. I installed this Mail plugin. It’s gorgeous. The tagging interface is easy enough to use. The search depends on Spotlight. Slow enough that I can call it broken.
I also wanted to track my contacts in the new Daylite 3. It also interacts with Apple Mail so you can attach messages to your opportunities and projects. It looks so cool. Without search, it’s useless.
All of these programs look very cool, by the way.
Enter Thunderbird
Now I’m toying around with Thunderbird. It’s searches are blindingly fast. It allows for saved searches, which means I can create mailboxes that are searches in essence.
My guess is that it’s using the IMAP server for search. That’s what it’s there for, right? (When I search for something in Apple Mail, my laptop gets dizzy.)
I know that Apple Mail works wonderfully with POP.
That means downloading all the mail, and not leaving a copy on the server. That’s really stupid in my book. I don’t want my e-mail in one place, like right here, at the end of a bar, in the French Quarter, sitting next to a open container. I want it someplace far away, backed up, centrally located.
I’m not sure now, what I’m going to do for a CRM. Maybe, Sugar CRM, with ZuckerMail.
If I had tagging working, I’d simply e-mail myself summaries of phone conversations and tag them properly, and notes as well.
Tagging With Thunderbird
Tagging in Thunderbird, using IMAP for search. I’m going to blog a proposal.
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Comments 
[...] Alan Gutierrez says that Apple Mail is just “too pitifully” slow when seaching IMAP accounts, even when they are cached locally. [...]
Err 30 seconds on mail box with one item… something else is wrong!
I can search 45MB mail box with 4,789 messages in the entire message in a blink of the eye. You have another issue here, this is not normal behaviour for Mail.app
I can search an entire 77.5MB account with 8,544 messages and “Entire Message” in what seems to be the same millisecond
Dang, I can search across 5 accounts with 180MB of messages and a hell of a lot of messages in that same blink of an eye…
Mail.app is blazingly fast in my experience
Geo
Are you using IMAP? Or are you using POP?
Thunderbird Tagging Extension
We need a tagging extension for Thunderbird. Urgently. It’s just a pain (and soooo “web 1.0″!) not being able to combine emails in an IMAP folder by other means than making yet another folder. I currently have a class whose mailingli…
I have the same experience with mail.app. Learching 4000 IMAP messages for a word in the subject line the app churns at 20% of memory, and takes 8 minutes to find 4 instances. In that time I can launch thunderbird 1.5 and it finds the same 4 in 8 seconds.
grrr.
I’m finding that Thunderbird is fast searching both my Dovecot IMAP server and local folders. I’m talking with Fred about building a tagging extention for Thunderbird using this search ability.
[...] Note: Thunderbird Tagging is my original post on this subject, and I’m linking to it to create a trackback. [...]
I’ve now written up my thunderbird tagging proposal, so go and read about it by following the trackback in the comment above this one.
For what it’s worth, I just checked this on my IMAP accounts. I’m able to search through a 9,000 message mailbox faster than I type out the search terms.
Something isn’t right with your installation. Mail.app is blisteringly fast for me.
[...] Alan Gutierrez says that Apple Mail is just “too pitifully” slow when seaching IMAP accounts, even when they are cached locally. [...]