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May 12, 2005
Smart Mailbox limitations in OS X Tiger
First of all, you can't make a smart mailbox for "everyone who is in my address book" Instead, you have to make one for "everyone who is in this group in my address book". So I got around that by making a group for everyone in my address book who does not have an anniversary date set (which is everyone).
But, it turns out that that is not a good solution. Like google, I don't sort, I search. So there's hundreds of messages laying around in my inbox. After a week of this, my "people I know" smart mailbox appears to have given up. It doesnt' even try to list all the messages from people I know. It would appear that the missing option in the smart mailbox config menu hides a performance bug?
Fortunately, disk space is cheap. So the second solution is to create a non-smart mailbox that contains copies of all messages from people in my address book (and not just the trivially univeral group!).
Performance will be better (and has been, so far) on this because each view of my non-smart (dumb?) mailbox does not require a re-query of all the hundreds of messages in my inbox against all of the tens of addresses in my address book. You wonder why they don't cache the results of a query and just rerun it on the new or changed messages after an update. Maybe they do?
The whole thing points out a problem with ALL of the apple-built software I run. And that problem is that apple-built software doesn't deal well with large lists. Xcode (v.1) was useless on a software project with around 50 files and hundreds of classes. Iphoto (the free one) takes a minute or two to open my photo database with 2 thousand photos in it. And now apple mail can't do queries on big message lists.
Posted by jones at May 12, 2005 10:43 AM
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