Pop Peeper Message Limit for IMAP Accounts?

[Godiva]

Probably a really basic question, but over the years, I have noticed a long delay from when I launch Pop Peeper to when it actually becomes available for use. I suspect that one reason is the increasing number of messages in several of my accounts (combined there are more than 40,000 messages). I have reduced the number of displayed messages in my POP3 accounts, but I haven't yet done so with my IMAP accounts (most of which are Gmail). Currently there is no number entered in the "Message limit" box for these accounts. Two questions related to changing this number:

1. Will entering a number in "Message limit" box in the Advanced settings (maybe down to a combined total of about 2500-3000 messages) noticeably speed up the loading of Pop Peeper?
2. On the IMAP/Gmail accounts, will reducing this number have any effect on the messages accessible from the source Gmail accounts? I suspect not, but since I've never tried this with an IMAP account, I just want to be certain.

Note that on all these accounts, the "Remove messages not on server" box is enabled. I am assuming this setting is irrelevant to my questions (especially, the 2nd one), but just in case it does matter, I wanted to mention it.

[mjs]

Are you using PPv4.5.3? -- because if you are I think PPv5 will be able to "launch" faster for both "opening" and/or starting (launching) PP.

To get an idea what you mean by when you "launch" PP.... Is this when you're starting up the PP process or simply opening the PP Interface window?

To elaborate -- are you closing PP when you are done using PP or are you "Exiting" PP?

I'm assuming you're aware of the difference but just in case:
1) "Closing" PP (the intended action when done with PP): Either by clicking on the Red X "close" button or the "-" to minimize (same thing as "close" button) to close PP (unless you have enabled the PPv5 "minimize" function to be used for the "close"/"minimize" button) will in any case leave the PP process running which will allow you to continue to get messages as they are retrieved by PP (and PP will as a result will launch quickly via the tray icon).
2) "Exiting" PP (is for the purpose of stopping the PP Process - not something you would usually do unless for a reason): Either going to "File">"Exit" or doing a right-click on the PP tray icon and clicking on the "Exit" option (because the PP process is not running message are not retrieved until you re-start PP which takes much longer to launch the PP Interface because the starting of the process functionally takes longer).

Basically going over 1 & 2 above:
1) By keeping the PP process running by "closing" PP - it will only take seconds for PP to open.
2) By ending the PP process by "Exiting" PP - it will take a much longer time for the process to start-up again.

Of course if you reboot a lot of the time which is possibly what you're doing (which is another consideration altogether) the process will be stopped and restarted on a boot-up so it will always take longer each time for PP to launch in this case. But during the time you're not rebooting if you simply doing a PP "Close" then it should "launch" or open (if that's what you mean by "launch) within seconds.

Sorry if I'm stating the obvious -- but I just wanted to get some clarity as to what exactly the word "launch" is referring to.

[Godiva]

v4.5.3 (even if v5 is faster, I'm wanting to deal with issues for v4 for now).

I'm talking about starting Pop Peeper "cold" (typically after a reboot). I rarely quit/exit Pop Peeper otherwise (unless I'm troubleshooting).

I do not have Pop Peeper set to start with Windows, so I manually start the program after a reboot (and normally after things are running smoothly, and everything is loaded). Even with waiting to start Pop Peeper, it can take 10 minutes before the program is accessible. I don't remember this being an issue long ago, so again I'm assuming one reason may be the massively larger number of emails Pop Peeper is now keeping track of.

I'm willing to experiment with changing the Message Limit setting, as long as it doesn't affect the original messages (I can't risk losing them).

BTW, Message Limit is not discussed at all in the Help file - hopefully this will be fixed in v5.

[mjs]

A 10 minute start-up seems to me to be far longer than should be the case.

What I would suggest is to wait for Jeff to go over this with you because there may be a number of potential contributing factors as to why it's taking that long for PP to start-up that would be better discussed with Jeff. Sorry I can't be of more help Godiva.

[Godiva]

lakrsrool - Do you have any idea if reducing the number of messages retrieved by entering a number into the "Message limit" box will have any permanent effects on a Gmail account using IMAP?

[mjs]

If what you mean by "Permanent" effect (by limiting the number of retrieved IMAP messages) -- will you loose some messages in the event you might want to return to not having a max number of messages to get retrieved then no (the former messages will remain on the Server). As long as you do not delete any messages yourself then if you were to set the "Max number of messages to retrieve" back to "0" (after formerly setting some limit number) so that all messages will be retrieved again then all of them will once again be retrieved (if none have been deleted). One caveat -- while all message will get retrieved if the "Max number of messages to retrieve" is reset to 0 there may be some messages that will get flagged as "New" again -- but other than than no problem. Btw, the "Remove messages not on server" box you referenced is only if you were to delete a message which would then be removed from the Server at that point and you would then not be able to retrieve the message at that point (so as you said is basically irrelevant to the discussion regarding message retrieval limit).

[Godiva]

if you were to set the "Max number of messages to retrieve" back to "0"

So entering "0" in the "Message limit" box is the same as leaving that box empty? An alternative (and logical) result would be that "0" means no messages are retrieved (again, without a discussion of "Message limit" in the help file, it's hard to know for sure).

[mjs]

Entering "0" is the same as not setting any limit (the idea on this is no one would not want any messages retrieved so "0" is the same as not setting any limit) -- so all messages (on the accounts Server) will reach the In-box (if set to "0").

[mjs]

... (again, without a discussion of "Message limit" in the help file, it's hard to know for sure).

If you do a search on this (i.e. "limit" - specifically under the subtopics "Advanced" or "Message Retrieval") you will find that "Help" states the following (including the reference to "0 = All"): "This option will limit the number of messages that is retrieved for POP3 and IMAP servers (0 = All)." So actually the "Max number of messages to retrieve" functionality is discussed within "Help" in at least a couple of places.

[Jeff]

BTW, Message Limit is not discussed at all in the Help file - hopefully this will be fixed in v5.

It certainly is -- press F1 while on the Message Retrieval page.

Even with waiting to start Pop Peeper, it can take 10 minutes before the program is accessible.

10 minutes?!? That doesn't sound right at all. Fortunately, POP Peeper can produce metrics for this, so we can see exactly where the problem is:
1) Press Ctrl+D (on the main window of POP Peeper)
2) Enable "Log miscellaneous"
3) Tick the "Save changes" checkbox
4) Press Close and press "Yes" to the "save permanently" confirmation
5) Exit and restart POP Peeper (technically, restarting PP without rebooting Windows won't provide as accurate information due to data caching, but it should still be sufficient)
6) After it's loaded, press Ctrl+D to access the log (select all the text in the window and then paste it into a text editor)

Here's an example that contains some of the more interesting output:

Code: Select all

[12:43:59 08/16] [] {Misc} 'DLL Load: 890 ms'
(individual account-DB load times)
[12:44:04 08/16] [] {Misc} 'DB Load (all) (result: 1): 5413 ms [22656 messages]'
[12:44:06 08/16] [] {Misc} 'App Init finished: 8097 ms' 

So in my case, it took 8 seconds to load, and I have 22K messages. And I will point out that this is a cached result, I did it a short while ago as proof of concept and it was closer to 11 seconds (which could very well have also included cached values, but I'm not able to reboot at the moment).

SO -- if you can include this information in your reply -- and I would like to see the individual account times, so if you don't want to include the names of your accounts, just delete the names of the accounts from the text -- and also:
- CPU
- HDD or SSD (or etc.)
- amount of RAM


As for the message limit -- applying a message limit will almost certainly help and will not affect the messages on the server. However, as the documentation suggests, this does have potential side-effects. A better solution is to clean the messages from the inbox folder, just by moving the existing messages to another folder. I would like to know more about the cause of the 10 minute load, though, so even if you do that, I'd appreciate you providing the above log and information first.