Search is extremely slow

Sorry about the late reply to this ticket. 172K messages does push MailMate to the limit, but 5 minute waits sounds like there may be something else wrong (some users claim to have close to 500K messages in MailMate).

If you haven't given up then try the following:

• Update to the latest test version by holding down ⌥ when clicking “Check Now” in the Software Update preferences pane.
• Perform one of the slow searches.

• While hanging, paste the following line in a Terminal window:

  sample MailMate 2 -file ~/Desktop/sample_mailmate.txt
  

Then upload the result file.

Again, sorry about the late answer.

Ok, here you go. I finally got back to the machine that this is happening on. Which I will be using a lot now.

@benny I'm in a similar boat. I've got 3 Gmail accounts (2 gmail.com, 1 GoogleApps) - totaling many million messages at about ~12GB.

The search gets pretty slow (not 5mins slow) but def not close to the gmail web interface. Anything I can do to speed it up?

@benny I also have similar issues, two Gmail accounts with millions of messages. Searches take at least 10 seconds if not more. Using the Gmail web interface, it's less than a second to search, of course. If MailMate can't handle searching so many messages, what's the suggested workaround to bring down search time? Archiving old messages so they are outside of search scope somehow? I'd prefer to search all messages but if that's not realistic, would rather have fast search of recent messages than long wait times. Thanks!

@Andrew: Millions of message would definitely push MailMate to its limit with its current design which is more focused on flexibility (every detail of every email is available for searching/smart mailboxes) than being able to handle large message stores.

For workarounds: It certainly makes sense to limit search by default to, e.g., a subset of mailboxes or maybe just recent messages. You can create any smart mailbox you want and then use the popup menu in the toolbar search field to make this the default to be used for searches. Alternatively, you can add conditions to the “All Messages” mailbox to limit what it includes (this is the default mailbox used for searches).

This might not help on the issues you describe in #3075, but maybe that is something which can be improved more easily.