Slow sidebar with large number of mailboxes

[Eric Durand]

Hi folks,

I am connecting to an imap server and have a large number of mailboxes
(>300). I am trying to find an efficient workflow to use the sidebar and
navigate through these mailboxes. Some are getting a lot of emails very
frequently, others very rarely. At first I configured all the mailboxes
with -poll, and set sidebar to check for new emails, and report new
message count. This was terribly slow. Every time I'd switch to the next
mailbox with unread messages in the sidebar, I'd have to wait for 4-5
seconds while mutt would (I guess) check all the mailboxes to update the
message count.

I then changed strategy, and created two files to list mailboxes:

1. mailboxes.nopoll.muttrc, where I list all the mailboxes with -nopoll argument
2. mailboxes.poll.muttrc, where I list the same mailboxes with -poll argument

Both these files are generated, so I don't mind the duplication.

Then I added the following macro:

bind index,pager G noop                                                                                                                                      
macro index,pager G ":source ~/.mutt/mailboxes.poll.muttrc^M:exec check-stats^M:source ~/.mutt/mailboxes.nopoll.muttrc^M" 

Now, when I press G, mutt basically does a manual check of all the
mailboxes, then gets back to -nopoll. As a result, switching between
folders in the sidebar is almost instantaneous, but with the caveat that
new message counts aren't updated automatically (I have to press G
again).

Curious if folks on this list have had to optimize for this kind of
scenario and what they came up with.

Thanks!
Eric