tip: speeding up (newsgroup) index display

[seebe...@realaddress.com]

If you're experiencing slow pine index display on newsgroups (or large
imap inboxes), it may be due to pine fetching and parsing some message
bodies in order to display the index. Depending on the size of the
messages referenced in the index, index display can be slowed
considerably. (This is also why the index-format ATT token is slow.)

Normally the message envelopes retrieved from the news server are enough
information to render the index. However if e.g. the index-format (
(M)ain (S)etup (C)onfig ) contains one of the FROM tokens and the envelope
"From:" header is malformed, pine will fetch and parse the message body to
render the FROM token.

There may be other exception conditions (bad message envelopes) which will
cause pine to fetch the message body.

In order to see if this is indeed the case, you can run pine with verbose
logging (pine -d verbose=9,imap=4), and see if messages are being fetched
when the index is displayed.

Also if you enable quell-imap-envelope-update you may be able to more
clearly see when pine is fetching a message in order to display its index
line.

Try editing the default index-format ( (M)ain (S)etup (C)onfig ) or the
other rule index-format, if applicable ( (M)ain (S)etup (R)ules (O)ther ).
Pine internal documentation contains a list and description of the tokens
available.

The minimal index-format "SHORTDATE1 SUBJECT", while not very descriptive,
seems to avoid pine having to fetch message bodies.

-alex
ude. dmu. sc@ nahcxela