Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!unido!uniol!henseler
From: henseler@uniol.UUCP (Herwig Henseler)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Faster reading of mailboxes with indexing
Keywords: elm mailbox fast index feature
Message-ID: <1887@uniol.UUCP>
Date: 27 Feb 90 18:53:46 GMT
Distribution: comp
Organization: University of Oldenburg, W-Germany
Lines: 25

Hello World,

When Un*x-mailers read a mailbox, they have to scan the whole file for
"From_"-lines to detect the top of the messages. So does elm. I can hardly
imagine a more uneffective way of achieving this aim! The mailbox format
is old enough to overcome an improvement...

Idea: Why not index this positions in a second file, so that only this
      file (with seek-positions for every "From_"-line together with the
      "From:"-entry, the "Subject:"-line and the total amount of lines)
      has to be scanned to build the internal tables for elm. This will be
      _much_ faster !

This would not break any standard, because this file may not exist for the
incoming mailbox. Maybe some MTA's will adopt this mechanism!
Even if not, it would speed up reading my folders. The only danger is
deleting mails from an indexed mailbox, but this can be detected via the
last-modified-date of the file.

Comments?

	bye, Herwig
--
## Herwig Henseler (CS-Student) D-2930 Varel, Tweehoernweg 69 | Brain fault- ##
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