I decided to use MailMate as a mailstore for many years of old
emails. I used Mailchemy to combine various scattered mbox files
and eliminate duplicate emails. The result is a huge repository of
emails (950,000 emails in a 10GB file). Mailchemy provides an IMAP
server implementation in the event that the client cannot import
files directly.
I readily admit that I'm doing some guessing here - I've been
wrong before!
All that being said, the process works very well when MailMate
connects to the server (via localhost) but appears to
be impatient when interrogating the server! In the initial
discovery process some iterations are called for but are not
successful. My belief is that MailMate is timing out because it
doesn't get the IMAP OK soon enough. Though it is
getting a stream of incoming data, that OK (which is
behind all that data) is what it is really waiting for. Here's some
log:
12:11:10 S: * 16715 FETCH (UID 16715 INTERNALDATE "10-Nov-2010 17:26:42 -0500")
12:11:10 S: * 16716 FETCH (UID 16716 INTERNALDATE "28-Sep-2010 10:48:53 -0400")
12:11:10 S: * 16717 FETCH (UID 16717 INTERNALDATE "27-Sep-2010 10:50:04 -0400")
12:11:10 S: * 16718 FETCH (UID 16718 INTERNALDATE "21-Oct-2010 08:14:16 -0400")
12:14:05 S: * 16719 FETCH (UID 16719 INTERNALDATE
12:14:05 Error code: 9
12:14:05 New timeout values (157/8): 262/81
12:14:05 Failed action (1003). Reset observed read/write timeouts: 131/8
12:14:05 Handling reply
12:14:05 Error: Failed multiple retries (4). Final error code was 9.
12:14:05 Terminating non-running connection...
12:16:05 Running action
12:16:05 Handling request
12:16:05 Trying to disconnect nicely (30)...
12:16:05 C: R7 LOGOUT
12:16:35 S:
12:16:35 Clearing connection to localhost
12:16:35 Ready to run action (type: 3, retry count: 0)
12:16:35 Disconnecting
12:16:35 Clearing connection to localhost
12:16:35 Completed action (3). Observed read/write timeouts: 131/8
It looks like MailMate increases the wait time after timeouts
but maybe not enough for this perverse use case.
While I was typing this, the above process transferred a few
thousand messages (that's happening on another Mac, with no screen,
dedicated to this task which may take days) so maybe I'm the entity
that should be patient! Anyway, I'm going to leave this ticket here
in case some comments on it, or, suggests a better method.
PS: IMAP doesn't need to gather that initial info about the what
the server is holding as one massive transaction .. it could ask
for smaller chunks (10k?) when faced with a deluge like mine.
Gavin Eadie