Data usage

[Keith Wiley]

I'm seeing some pretty surprising data usage from K-9 and I would like
to better understand how to predict its usage.

First of all, sometimes it looks like K-9's inbox "clears out" at the
same time that it is syncing new mail. I've watched this for a few
years now and have never quite understood what's going on. I always
assumed it was simply clearing enough old messages to maintain the
folder-size limit (default 25 messages)...but it seems to be very
slow, incrementally clearing old messages one at a time and only then,
eventually, loading new messages. It's almost as if clearing old
messages before loading new messages involves some sort of server-
access. Shouldn't it simply "throw away" the requisite number of
messages instantly and then start loading new messages to meet the
folder-limit (say, 25 messages)? What does this slow "throwing-away"
consist of?

At any rate, say I have a pretty small upper size limit. The default
is 32kb. Say I sync every 15 minutes (really, the sync frequency
shouldn't matter, only the total size of all messages under the limit
over the course of a day should matter, so I don't think the sync rate
matters). If I am seeing 20MBs of data usage a day, the implication
is that K-9 is loading around 625 sub-32kb emails per day, and that
assumes they are all EXACTLY 32kb. If a lot of them are smaller, then
the total number of messages is that much greater, 1000 messages
wouldn't even be a factor of 2.

...which is ridiculous. I don't get 1000 emails a day.

Thus my confusion. What might explain why I am seeing so much data
traffic from K-9? I'm not sure what to do about it. Obviously, I can
decrease the max-size and I suppose I can stretch the sync frequency
(although as I stated above, that should really affect the total data
usage by my logic)...but really, where is this data usage coming from
in the first place?

Thanks for any clarification.

Cheers!

[Keith Wiley]

On Mar 2, 1:56 pm, Keith Wiley <kbwi...@gmail.com> wrote:

> (although as I stated above, that should really affect the total data usage by my logic)

TYPO: "should" -> "shouldn't"

[cketti]

Are you using a POP3 account? If so, getting the list of messages on the
server could be responsible for the data usage. That list needs to be
requested on every sync attempt. So having many messages in the inbox
and/or increasing the sync frequency aggravates this problem.

[Keith Wiley]

Ah, okay, it is POP3. I wonder how much of a list it's getting. You
don't really think it's getting the entire inbox list do you? :-/

Thanks.

[cketti]

For each message at least the message index and the message size is
returned, e.g.

1 8134
2 9817
3 124900
...

[ashley willis]

pop is not designed for storage, but for download and delete. every time
you log in it has to get the *entire* UIDL map of messages, and each
UIDL can be from 1 to 70 printable ASCII characters, preceded by the
message number (in ASCII) and a space, and terminated by CRLF. so, at a
minimum for one message you could have "1 1\r\n" which is 5 bytes. my
hotmail account gives 37 byte UIDs such as
30F4C4DA-6DA0-497C-8767-847AEBD781B4, so that's at least 41 bytes per
message. 10 thousand messages would give a list of over 400KB just to
get one new mail! or even none, i'm guessing.

-ashley

-ashley
--
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Eleanor Roosevelt

[ashley willis]

okay, no nevermind my example, which is one way to do it. this will use significantly less data, but it's still quite a hit. for 10k messages, it'd be over 100 KB.

cketti <cke...@googlemail.com> wrote:

-ashley
--
sent from my modified k-9 mail