dovecot - Apr 2022 - Bad Signature - Both Roundcube and Squirrelmail webmail cannot search for anything + cannot open many emails because there are more than 200, 000 emails in my Inbox

I believe Gmail is using IMAP. The instructions for configuring Gmail
email accounts in Outlook specifically mention IMAP server hostname:

imap.gmail.com

TCP Port 993, SSL

Regards,

Mr. Turritopsis Dohrnii Teo En Ming
Targeted Individual in Singapore
20 Apr 2022 Wednesday


On Wed, 20 Apr 2022 at 09:26, Shawn Heisey <elyograg at elyograg.org>
wrote:
>
> On 4/19/2022 5:12 PM, Turritopsis Dohrnii Teo En Ming wrote:
> > It is not true that no email system was ever designed for 200,000 or
> > more emails.
> >
> > If I did not remember wrongly, more than 10 years ago, I used to have
> > a Gmail email account, with 4-5 MILLION email messages in the Inbox.
> > There was no problem searching even though I had 4-5 MILLION email
> > messages in the Inbox.
>
> If you were using either a Google app or the gmail.com website to access
> that inbox, then it doesn't compare.  I really doubt that either of
> those uses the IMAP protocol.  They would be using something proprietary
> that is highly optimized for the way that Google stores data and
> leverages the enormous amounts of computing power that they maintain.
>
> I would bet that if you accessed a gmail folder with 5 million messages
> in it using IMAP, you would have similar problems with it to those that
> have been described here in this thread.  IMAP is a beautiful protocol,
> but I don't think it was designed for handling that many messages.
>
> Thanks,
> Shawn
>

On 4/20/22 07:51, Turritopsis Dohrnii Teo En Ming wrote:
> I believe Gmail is using IMAP. The instructions for configuring Gmail
> email accounts in Outlook specifically mention IMAP server hostname:
>
> imap.gmail.com
>
> TCP Port 993, SSL
Indeed you CAN use IMAP with gmail.? For work, I mostly use my email 
(which is gmail-based) via Thunderbird, with IMAP.? I am familiar with it.

But if I use the Gmail app for Android or the gmail website, I feel 
absolutely certain that those applications are NOT using IMAP.? Chances 
are that they use protocols developed by Google.

Regarding your next email on this thread, the initial sync of a large 
number of messages via IMAP does take a really long time. But once the 
initial sync is complete, syncing the differences is very fast.? The big 
problem with accessing a large folder via a webmail app like Roundcube 
is that it never sets up a local copy of the mailbox.? I actually don't 
know where the copy of all those message headers resides ... whether it 
is in the PHP interpreter or in the browser.? But it's not persisted to 
disk as it would be with a more traditional IMAP client such as Thunderbird.

Thanks,
Shawn

On Wed, Apr 20, 2022 at 09:51:18PM +0800, Turritopsis Dohrnii Teo En Ming
wrote:
> I believe Gmail is using IMAP. The instructions for configuring Gmail
> email accounts in Outlook specifically mention IMAP server hostname:
> 
> imap.gmail.com
> 
> TCP Port 993, SSL
Gmail offers an IMAP2 endpoint so that users can connect to Gmail with
IMAP2 clients (Thunderbird, Claws, Apple's Mail.app, or whatever) if
they wish to.

However, Gmail's web interface, and Gmail's proprietary mobile apps,
almost certainly do *not* use IMAP2 to communicate with the Gmail
servers.  As has already been pointed out in this thread, they likely
use a proprietary protocol optimised for that proprietary environment.

Sam