[Users] Downloads for offline use need to be multi-threaded for speed

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 07 September 2014 09:32:18 blind Pete did opine
And Gene did reply:
> On Sat, 6 Sep 2014 20:41:35 +0530
> 
> Rajib Bandopadhyay <bkpsusmitaa at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Dear Friends,
> > 
> > The pre-processing filters make
> > claws-mail terribly slow to download
> > posts from newsgroups.
> > 
> > The speed could be sufficiently improved
> > if the downloads are made
> > multi-threaded.
> > 
> > Is it possible to improve upon the
> > download speed?
> > 
> > Could this be implemented please?
> > 
> > Regards
> > Rajib Bandopadhyay
> 
> Consider installing a news spool.  I use leafnode, but there are
> others.  The news spooler periodically downloads news posts in
> the background, then your news reader only has to fetch items
> from the hard drive.
> 
> One day I have to get around to configuring dovecot to do the
> same job for mail.

That would probably, in the long view, be a mistake.  I am still doing 
everything by pop3 here, and while kmail CAN do that easily enough, its a 
job its ill suited for because its single threaded.

So I have, for nearly a decade now, offloaded that mail fetching duty to 
fetchmail, which hands it off to procmail for filtering and delivery into 
a /var/spool/mail/name mailfile.

And I have a session of inotifywait that dies, reporting which of these 
name files has been updated, and when it dies, it then sends kmail over 
the dbus, a go fetch the mail command, and the parent script then restarts 
it to wait for the next mail arrival, and kmail is only configured to 
fetch the mail from /var/spool/mail, and that it can do it 10 
milliseconds.  All the other mail fetching activity is a background task 
this multicore machine handles with no visible or feelable side effects.

So regardless of your favorite email agent, off loading the online mail 
fetching activities to something designed to be a background task will be 
a genuine enhancement to your enjoyment because you'll never have to wait 
30+ seconds for it to process and deliver your incoming mail in the middle 
of typing an answer to a previously received email.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
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