Here are a collection of tips that may make exmh work better for you.
While there are lots of choices in the way you can use exmh,
a few features seem to work pretty well and are worth emphasizing.
Some other features may not be worth
using because they slow things down too much.
You can set up exmh to periodically
incorporate mail (run inc) for you.
If you already do this via a filtering system, you should
have exmh periodically check for
new mail in your folders.
This is called the flist action.
The folder highlighting and icon feedback
work best with inc and flist.
Instead of flist, exmh can periodically
run msgchk or count messages in your system mailbox.
The disadvantage of running msgchk is that
there's no audible or icon feedback when new mail is waiting in
your mailbox.
There is only a status message that you might not notice.
Choose the background action and how
frequently it's done with the Background Processing
preferences section.
exmh maintains a cache of the scan output for each folder.
If you run MH programs from outside of exmh, the cache may get
out of date.
You can manually update the cache with the Rescan Folder
operation under the Folder More... menu.
There are also menu entries that update scan caches for all your folders.
These run in the background so the user interface can remain active.
The scan cache is
compatible with xmh.
If you want message display to go as fast as possible, do three things:
Disable the X-Face pipeline command so exmh won't try
to decompress X-Face: header fields.
Disable the facesaver database.
(This is different than the X-Face pipeline.)
Actually, the database is slow only for the first message you receive from
a new email address.
The pathname of the bitmap image that corresponds to that
address is cached.
Caching avoids time-consuming lookup when
you view another message from that address.
Disable the Graphic Separator in the MIME preferences.
That uses a 3D line of text instead of a blank line; it
takes a bit longer to display.
If you really like using the keyboard instead of the mouse,
you can change folders, set the target folder, and select messages
by number with keyboard commands.
When you type plus (+), focus warps to the status line so you
can type in the name of a folder.
In this mode,
Typing + cycles between two entry points:
the target folder for moves and a folder to change into.
<space> does folder name completion.
Keep pressing <space> to cycle
through all matching folder names.
<Return> accepts the folder name.
<Control-c> cancels the folder selection.
If you start by typing a number (not +), the message is
selected, but it isn't displayed until you press <Return>.
exmh does not handle very large folders well.
If a folder grows to have more than 500 messages or so, you
will notice a slowdown in the time it takes to change in and
out of that folder.
Take this as a hint to clean up by moving old messages into subfolders.
(The Figure A subfolder
shows a folder and subfolder.)
Every three months or so I move old messages into subfolders with
names like 94Q2, 94Q3, and so on.