Starting in late 2014 I have stopped deleting messages, putting them in a
directory, +gone, which now contains 465,147 messages and uses about 17
gigabytes. The bulk of these messages were of transitory or of less interest
to me. But they include 1,702 messages from my daughter. They were almost all
of no interest or use to me within a day or two of when she sent them. But she
recently died (the worst thing by far that's ever happened to me). Now every
byte she ever wrote is precious to me. So I am glad that I stopped deleting
messages that I no longer care about.
In practice this large folder has little impact on performance. For example,
whenever I do a pick which is, or in a script which might be, +gone, I give it
an argument like last:100000. I could, if necessary split +gone into several
smaller folders, but I would rather not. But I'm concerned that a bug in nmh
might cause a problem. For example, some kind of a buffer overflow.
So, what is the likelihood of such a bug? Does anybody have any experience
dealing with such large folders?
Norman Shapiro
----------
Starting in late 2014 I have stopped deleting messages, putting them in
a directory, +gone, which now contains 465,147 messages and uses
about 17 gigabytes. The bulk of these messages were of transitory or of less
interest to me. But they include 1,702 messages from my daughter. They
were almost
all of no interest or use to me within a day or two of when she sent them.
But she recently died (the worst thing by far that's ever happened to me).
Now every byte she ever wrote is precious to me. So I am glad that I stopped
deleting messages that I no longer care about.
In practice this large folder has little impact on performance. For example,
whenever I do a pick which is, or in a script which might be, +gone I give
it an argument like last:100000. I could, if necessary split +gone into
several smaller folders, but I would rather not. But I'm concerned that a bug
in nmh might cause a problem. For example, some kind of a buffer overflow.
So, what is the likelihood of such a bug? Does anybody have any experience
dealing with such large folders?
such a large folder might
Norman Shapiro