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As a side-side-project I'm working on a classifier for my emails (given that 99.9% of all emails are junk but have a DMARC policy, the anti-spam filters are not doing much anymore). Long story short my whole Gmail is in a multi-gigabyte SQLite and I can find any email in milliseconds

12/10/26, 7:52 pm0 reposts0 likes

The Projekt

@wearetheprojekt.bsky.social

Strip the quoted reply chains before indexing with FTS5, or every search hit is the same paragraph quoted twelve times down a thread.

Rémy

@xowap.dev

I didn't know about this extension, it's pretty cool! Although I'm not even there yet, I'm just noticing that you can parse all those emails like butter and yet somehow the average email client will require many CPU cycles for anything 🥲

The Projekt

@wearetheprojekt.bsky.social

Parsing is the cheap part. Most of a mail client's CPU goes to rendering HTML bodies and keeping its search index in sync, which a one shot script never has to do.

Rémy

@xowap.dev

That's what I believed, but how exactly? Ingesting and indexing is not even a blip on the radar. A couple of µs/mail on my 10-years-old-never-emptied inbox. Once indexed, search is FAST. And displaying HTML... If they weren't so busy rolling custom utterly stupid renderers maybe I guess?

Rémy

@xowap.dev

Which really begs the question: what the FUCK have email clients been doing because not one is able to deal with more than 100 emails peacefully 🫠 Maybe a good side-side-side-project is going to be an email client that works?