Comments on: Evolution + Gmail IMAP = …really slow?

By: antono

antono — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 03:31:33 +0000

its really strange but i changed outgouing smtp port to 465 and it helped!

smtp.gmail.com:465

By: HorizonXP

HorizonXP — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:51:13 +0000

Just figured something out to speed things up, and thought I’d pipe in.

In Evolution, do this:

Edit -> Preferences
Under Mail Accounts, select your Gmail IMAP account, and click Edit.

Go to the last tab, IMAP Headers. Select the second option, Basic Headers – (Fastest)

I’m not sure of the consequences of this, but I do know that things sped up considerably for me, with no other side effect so far. YMMV.

By: Jeremy Nickurak

Jeremy Nickurak — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 18:38:19 +0000

Probabbly related to the quirky way that evolution checks for new mail in imap folders:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=336076

By: jj

jj — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 18:13:54 +0000

I think the main reason for slowness, with any client is that the All Mail folder that is created has THOUSANDS of emails. For every label that you have used, you now have another COPY of that email in a separate folder. So.. If you have 10,000 emails stored on GMAIL, and 1000 of them have labels, your IMAP client has to check and compare headers on 11,000 records each time you connect. My numbers are much higher than that! I can’t unsubscribe from All Mail (it keeps coming back) so… it is achingly slow.

By: sai narasimha reddy

sai narasimha reddy — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 03:47:28 +0000

Ya it’s really slow. GMail + evolution sucks

By: Tony Yarusso

Tony Yarusso — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 00:22:45 +0000

I’ve used GMail’s IMAP with both Thunderbird and Evolution now, and in both cases the just plug it in and go solution is completely unusable. This seems to be because the protocol involves checking your user credentials, passing server access commands, and transferring the reply to check for new mail and download it for every single folder you have, or for every _message_ if you don’t have the download for offline use option set. The problem of course becomes worse if you have a larger number of folders – due to lots of FLOSS mailing lists, I have around 200.

I would recommend setting up your client to download all mail for offline use, provided you have the HDD space. Additionally, since all of my mail is either in a folder or still waiting in the Inbox to be sorted, I set the option for “only show subscribed folders”, and unsubscribe from the catch-all “GMail” folder. If you have a lot of e-mails to read and don’t anticipate replying to many, reading mail goes a lot faster of you choose to “work offline” while doing so.

By: Peteris Krisjanis

Peteris Krisjanis — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 16:00:19 +0000

Strange, I use Evolution with my work’s IMAP and it works much better than POP3 connection. Of course, it is OS X server with unix IMAP, not Exchange “IMAP”, which has serious problems with lot of clients.

Anyway, IMAP is more for intranets and local connections, but it can be improved to be usable over distances. However, Google is too far for some of us, so…

By: jorge

jorge — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 05:17:59 +0000

Evo sucks at imap. I’ve tried to use it with the imap server being on a local lan and it’s still slow.

By: Jayson Rowe

Jayson Rowe — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 03:06:09 +0000

I did try it once with Evolution and found it to be horribly slow – almost unusable…I quickly went to Alpine, and it works quite fast there

By: Darren

Darren — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 22:04:02 +0000

I had the same issue, what I did was uncheck the option to synchronize mail locally and then went and right clicked on each folder I wanted to use and selected “Copy Folder Content locally for offline operations”.

By doing this I kept Evolution from downloading mail from my spam or “All Mail” folders. Just my inbox and 11 other folders I care about.

In general by using this method a full mailbox send/receive takes between 10 and 30 seconds. Not bad.