On Sun, Apr 13, 2014 at 10:41:14PM -0700, Russell Miller wrote:
On Apr 13, 2014, at 10:25 PM, Keith Keller kkeller@wombat.san-francisco.ca.us wrote:
In the context of the OP, when mutt tries to deal with a message (e.g., deleting, moving to a folder), it can be boatloads faster, since handling the message works on a small file which contains just that message. Deleting a message from an mbox mailbox, for example, requires rewriting the entire changed mbox file to disk (minus the deleted message). Deleting a message from a Maildir mailbox is just removing one file from a directory.
Time spent with mutt searching a directory can be drastically cut by using caching. See my old page, http://home.roadrunner.com/~computertaijutsu/mutt.html#IMAP
Even if not using IMAP, using a $HOME/.mutt_cache can greatly speed things up.