Filters slowww opening mailboxes

At first I thought the Open Mailbox function of my filters wasn't working, until I went off and did something else for a while and noticed when I came back that the boxes had finally opened. So I pulled out a stopwatch app and checked.

Eudora checked mail, opened the relevant boxes, and played the alert sound in about five seconds.

Immediately checking mail in Pandora, it took over nine minutes for it to open the mailboxes, though I could see from the mailbox pane that messages had been received. The little envelope was flashing saying windows (I forget how many, but it wasn't more than three) "pending to be opened," and there was nothing showing in the Task pane.

What on earth takes it so long?

Seriously, this renders Pandora almost unusable. Yeah, it displays some messages better than Eudora, 10-15 minutes after checking. Between that, the messages that don't display at all (even when sent to a browser), and well over half of imported messages looking blank even though the content is in the mailbox file if I open it in a text editor, I think I'm just going to write off Pandora as a loss.

Maybe that creature messed up something, otherwise the same notification rule is applicable as for the sound action. So, locate the filter and check Notify as Usual.

Alternativelly, check inside each and every relevant filter > Action/Open Mailbox.

Admin wrote:Alternativelly, check inside each and every relevant filter > Action/Open Mailbox.

As they are, the filters do open the mailboxes... eventually.

I timed it again today. 14 messages, 8 boxes. Eudora took about 9 seconds to check, download, filter, open boxes, and play the New Message sound.

Pandora took roughly the same amount of time as Eudora did to download, then sat on "8 window(s) pending to be open" for abut 19 minutes, then a further 6-ish minutes non-responsive, before finally opening the boxes and slowly filtering the messages to them, for a total of about 28 minutes (give or take my slow reaction time and not being sure it was done since it doesn't play the New Message alert sound).

28 minutes to do something Eudora does in under 10 seconds is ridiculous.

I'm in the process of updating my filters to notify as usual, and if that has any effect on the speed at which mail is downloaded and filtered I'll let you know.

[quote="Admin"Alternativelly, check inside each and every relevant filter > Action/Open Mailbox.[/quote]

Argh, now it's playing the new message notification sound several times, I think once for each mailbox, which is not the desired result. But for whatever reason that did seem to solve the problem of Pandora taking over 20 minutes to filter a handful of messages and open their respective boxes.

Is there no way to get Pandora to both filter messages in a timely manner and only play the new message sound once? :-(

No, Pandora is filtering messages immediately, you can confirm that by checking that there are no active tasks. Those 20 minutes are not related, most likely general notification action (related to not-filtered messages ie. Settings/Notifications).

Sound is played per message filtered (not related to destination mailbox) and yes sounds will overlap (so you hear 2 sounds for 2 messages etc). I can certainly add that as option, so sound is played no more than once per check.

So it sounds like, for now, my choices are turn off the global notification (rather than changing dozens of filters one at a time, again), or hear the new message sound a hundred+ times when I check mail for the first time in a while. I'll opt for no sound over multiple overlapping repeats of this :-) (Yes, that's my new mail sound, I'm a geek/nerd/dork. )

After putting up with this for several days, and seeing (as Admin noted) that the messages filter and I can open the mailboxes myself instead of waiting half an hour for Pandora to open them, I tried turning off opening mailboxes in the individual filters (search-and-replace on the filters file while Pandora is closed is SO much faster than doing them one at a time!) and just leaving the "Open mailbox" option in Settings > General > Notifications. Then I checked mail and the boxes all opened blazing fast. Yay!

But then the next time I checked mail, without having changed any other settings, it was back to watching the little envelope flash forever while it got around to opening fewer messages/mailboxes than the time it went quickly. Boo.

I'm really at a loss on this. If it's not the filters, as seems to be the case, then what's the holdup?

Update today: Most of my email, well over half, maybe in the 70-80% range (never actually counted) comes to one account, the rest to a few other accounts. So sometimes I'll check that one account and then hit the check-all button.

First check, just the one account, mail downloaded, filtered, and 13 boxes opened in short order. So far, so good.

Then I hit Check Mail to get the rest, opened the stopwatch app on the phone, and watched the little "10 window(s) pending to be opened" icon flash... for 32 minutes. It opened 2 boxes that weren't already open (which was correct, the rest of the mail from that 2nd check was properly filtered to boxes that had been opened by the first check).

I didn't change anything between those two checks, so I don't think this is a settings issue.

At that point, I figured if I close and reopen Pandora before checking it should open mailboxes quickly. But when I checked again, with maybe one or two new messages, it took almost a minute for the "pending to be opened" icon to stop flashing.

So now I'm thinking, it gets confused if it's supposed to open a box that's already open? I don't know if it's a filter thing or not, since I turned off opening mailboxes in all of the filters.

I guess the next thing will be to make sure I close most boxes before trying to check. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Edit: Nope, closing all of the boxes didn't help, since it just took it several minutes to open two boxes for two new emails.

My first check of this forum for a month or so ... I don't have an answer for your particular case, but just wanted to say that I'm not having any issues with filter performance, so you can be assured that it's not a generic Pandora problem.

After migrating from Eudora and then a year or two of living with Pandora I have around 3000 filters. They occasionally might all need to be checked (for the more occasional incoming messages), and I've tried to manually place a handful of what I consider to be the most frequently-triggered ones nearer to the start of the filters list, which probably has a minor effect on speeding up filtr processing.

I have sound switched off off completely with Pandora, and before that with Eudora, so can't make any comment about what effect that has.

If I havem say, 40 or 50 incoming messages it might take ten to twenty seconds to process them and open their respective mailboxes, but nowhere near the minutes that you're experiencing.

So I encourage you to keep trying to get to the bottom of things. Keep us in the loop so we can assist you -- or at least give our opinions, for what they're worth!

As Admin noted, it turned out the delay wasn't the filters but rather the mailboxes opening. I could see from the unread numbers in the mailbox list that new messages were where they were supposed to be, and if I opened a mailbox manually they were there. IIRC something I tweaked finally mostly solved that, but I don't remember what it was. Maybe turning off having the filters open the boxes on new mail and just letting the global setting handle it?

The bigger problem with Pandora was the messages that wouldn't display at all, especially when they still didn't display when sent to the browser. Running both programs in parallel, when it became clear that there were messages I could only see while using Eudora I realized that Pandora wasn't going to work for me as a replacement so I stopped using it.

LJWolfe wrote:As Admin noted, it turned out the delay wasn't the filters but rather the mailboxes opening. I could see from the unread numbers in the mailbox list that new messages were where they were supposed to be, and if I opened a mailbox manually they were there. IIRC something I tweaked finally mostly solved that, but I don't remember what it was. Maybe turning off having the filters open the boxes on new mail and just letting the global setting handle it?

The bigger problem with Pandora was the messages that wouldn't display at all, especially when they still didn't display when sent to the browser. Running both programs in parallel, when it became clear that there were messages I could only see while using Eudora I realized that Pandora wasn't going to work for me as a replacement so I stopped using it.

I have found that sometimes the following happens:

• All messages in the In mailbox are being properly displayed.
  
• The Check Mail command is processed, messages are downloaded, and no messages in the In mailbox are being displayed.
  
• Clicking on View | Show Messages | All causes all messages to once again be displayed.
  

The failure to display messages in the In mailbox following a Check Mail is a random happening that I have not been able to narrow down.  However, the command View | Show Messages | All always causes all messages in the In mailbox to be displayed.

This problem has been reported to Brana and was introduced with version 5.7.0.1.

Butch

butchkemper wrote:I have found that sometimes the following happens:

• All messages in the In mailbox are being properly displayed.
  
• The Check Mail command is processed, messages are downloaded, and no messages in the In mailbox are being displayed.
  
• Clicking on View | Show Messages | All causes all messages to once again be displayed.
  

The failure to display messages in the In mailbox following a Check Mail is a random happening that I have not been able to narrow down.  However, the command View | Show Messages | All always causes all messages in the In mailbox to be displayed.

This problem has been reported to Brana and was introduced with version 5.7.0.1.

If I'm reading you right, it's not the problem I'm having.

All of the messages show up in the message list of the relevant box (In or wherever they were filtered to). The problem is a blank message body. In Eudora, I can easily right-click and send to browser and see the content. In Pandora, the fiddly send-to-browser work-around only shows the message headers. If I view the mailbox file in a text editor the content is there, so I know nothing's stripping it.

So, the bottom line is there are some messages that there doesn't seem to be any way to view the contents when using Pandora. And sadly that's a deal-breaker, even if Pandora is better than Eudora at other things.

I sent a selection of the offending messages to Brana, so maybe a later version will have a fix for whatever's causing the problem, and then I'll gladly give Pandora another shot :-). Though then I'll still have to deal with the other issues I've posted about.