Well, more data. First of all I solved my email hang on start problem with this script:
cd ~zaurus
rm -rf Mail
rm -rf Settings/qtmail*
for x in slinbox sloutbox slmtrash slinunrd;do
rm -rf Applications/dtm/$x.*
rm -rf /usr/mnt.rom/card/QtPalmtop/dtm/$x.*
done
I'm not sure about the Mail directory - I expect it was created by sylpheed, but I wanted to be sure. qtmail ran fine after this.
I reconfigured my account and started the download again. I let it run for quite a while, and it slowly fetched my mail:
$ while true;do
> ls -l dtm/slinbox.box
> sleep 60
> done
-rwxrwxrwx 1 zaurus qpe 934747 Feb 23 14:56 dtm/slinbox.box
-rwxrwxrwx 1 zaurus qpe 975450 Feb 23 14:57 dtm/slinbox.box
-rwxrwxrwx 1 zaurus qpe 1129104 Feb 23 14:58 dtm/slinbox.box
-rwxrwxrwx 1 zaurus qpe 1307628 Feb 23 14:59 dtm/slinbox.box
-rwxrwxrwx 1 zaurus qpe 1474221 Feb 23 15:00 dtm/slinbox.box
-rwxrwxrwx 1 zaurus qpe 1543758 Feb 23 15:01 dtm/slinbox.box
-rwxrwxrwx 1 zaurus qpe 1606012 Feb 23 15:02 dtm/slinbox.box
Looks like about 3K per second. CPU was maxed, and the load average was over 3. After 20 or 30 minutes the Z killed the mail app. Free memory was only about 1 meg at that point, so maybe that was the reason. Total mail downloaded at that point, a little under 2 megs.
When i restart the application it takes about 5 seconds before it displays my messages, and about 5 seconds to change to a new folder. It shows as unread some (but not all) messages which I have already read on other machines. When I tell it to download new messages, I see a small "start connecting" window that stays there, and the size of slinbox.box does not change.
After ten minutes I gave up, and tried to exit the application. It would not exit. I had to kill it.
This application seems quite incapable of handling my imap email,and it's downloaded fewer than 6000 messages so far. Can it be improved? Is there something better? surely I am not the only person using IMAP on a Z?
Frank.