Thanks to the hackfest time Igalia gently gives me every week I could resume the work I had previously started to add ENVELOPE
support to tinymail.
What’s this stuff about? Well basically what we can do now is ask the server for ENVELOPE
instead of fetching a random set of headers (like ‘From:’, ‘Subject:’ …). Why is this cool? For several reasons:
- Speed: IMAP servers do cache
ENVELOPE
information so they do not have to inspect every email message to extract the requested headers. They can give youENVELOPE
blazingly fast (I run a rough test and downloading a folder with ~1500 headers from AOL IMAP server lasted twice the time of downloadingENVELOPE
andBODYSTRUCT
, and this means minutes). - Bandwidth:
ENVELOPE
is smaller in size than headers as the name of the headers is not transmitted over the network - Future: RDF storage support in tinymail is now closer