Deleting large number of emails from busy mailbox

[Vegard Svanberg]

* Kevin J. McCarthy <kevin at 8t8.us> [2023-03-13 21:07]:

> Do you mean the 2000 emails you want to delete, or the half-million emails
> in the mailbox?

The 2000 I want to delete, yes. :-)

> If it's the first, it sounds as if Mutt thinks the value in $trash is not
> the same server as the mailbox you are connected do.  Otherwise it would do
> a UID COPY on the server side, which would be faster.

Holy moly, I just re-discovered I had a trash! Which, needless to say, is
huge... I'd forgotten all about it.

You're right, they're not the same. Mailbox is on IMAP, trash is a local
file.

Well, that explains it, then. 

After reading the fine manual, I don't see an immediate way to disable
trash. Assuming I'll have to move it to IMAP then. Which is fine, just
wondering if trash could be disabled as I don't really need it.

> > a few minutes), Mutt never gets around to actually removing the
> > messages. It just seems to abort in the middle of the operation and I
> > have to do expunge again until I eventually succeed after a few
> > attempts.
> > 
> > Anything I could do my end to solve this?
> 
> That's unfortunately an old issue with Mutt's sync design.  It checks the
> mailbox for any reopen/new/flag updates before trying to sync and aborts if
> that's the case.

Well at least that explains why it's behaving that way. Thank you!

-- 
Vegard Svanberg <vegard at svanberg.no> [*Takapa at IRC (EFnet)]