... is really slow for opening large mailboxes, are you using some trick to make it faster? mutt alone just scans all mails before displaying anything. thats not a good idea for 100k+ emails

there's the mutt header_cache directive which can help

although if you have 100k+ emails in a folder, particularly a non-archive folder I'd suggest you're doing it wrong

header_cache only works with Maildir and IMAP. If he's using Maildir for a mailbox w/ 100k+ emails, then he may start running into filesystem limitations.

notmuch

However, you must be willing to integrate it with other tools (a frontend, something like fetchmail, and something like procmail, etc.).

my particular recipe involves fetchmail, procmail, msmtp, vim, aspell, ical, etc..

but yes, if you are stuffing +100k emails into one folder -- that is completely insane -- that's why you use procmail to sort your email into different folders as it arrives; I subscribe to a LOT of email lists and ctrl-D delivers a lot of magic when I don't want to or have the time to sort through a bunch of crap but

pine