Squirrel Mail is SLOW

General discussions and other topics.
8 posts Page 1 of 1
by jilbrown » Thu May 04, 2023 10:02 am
Hi all,

Has anyone else who uses Squirrel Mail noticed that it is slow to load and respond. I use it somewhat regularly because it used to be fast. Now it takes 2 to 3 minutes to present the inbox after logging in. Sonic support says to empty cache and reboot. Not only that, I tried it on brand new installs of Windows 10, Monterey and Big Sur; I tried it with Safari, Firefox and Chrome. This is a server side issue Sonic. Take a few moments away from swimming in your Scrooge McDuck vault of money and look at your Squirrel logs.

Ready to dump Sonic, they just don't care anymore.
by gu » Thu May 04, 2023 10:46 am
Honest question: Why are you still using Squirrel Mail? I'm seriously not trying to be an a-hole, I just want to understand.

In my opinion, there are far easier and more efficient ways to access email, including macOS's Mail, Sonic's other Webmail platform (webmail.sonic.net), and even Alpine through the Unix shell, so I'm just curious why anyone would still want to use Squirrel Mail.

Cheers,
-g-
by jilbrown » Fri May 05, 2023 7:39 am
Squirrel works (or used to work) every time with no hitches and no unnecessary clutter and distractions. Just email. Get in, do your work and get out. I spend easily half or less the amount of time dealing with email when using squirrel than roundcube or whatever the newer sonic web email package they supply. It works(worked) on any platform with even 512MB of RAM and drawing 7 watts total power. Newer isn't always better, just a trade-off. I will have to consider Alpine but it only works on unix/linux/bsd systems unless you have 64-bit Windows with 5 billion gigs of RAM running linux subsystem -- not my preferred OS. World Internet Pause Day is coming on May 31. . .it should be a week or month. Time to get back to the basics. Sonic updated squirrel but haven't bothered to configure it properly. Once again they have referred me to the forums. A dead end to getting anything done properly. Sonic doesn't care about customers or the service. . .just the income.

<Rant>
And maybe it's just nostalgia. Why do some people still drive cars that are 50 years old? They like them and are comfortable with them. I drive a 30+ year old car. I will never give it up and they will have to bury me with it because my hands will not be able to be removed from the steering wheel. I would be a 'smoker' from Waterworld -- never gonna give up my fossil fuels and internal combustion engine; it is probably the most important invention since the plow. It reminds them of different times and often better times. I don't believe the internet has made the world a better place. I will probably get a no-knock warrant at my home later today by the FBI/CIA/NSA. . .for speaking ill of the 'precious' internet. And it isn't my home since the government can come anytime and kick me out to put in a solar farm or restore a wetlands for the spotted salamander. And let's not get into asset forfeiture and jury nullification.
</Rant>

I would love to hear your comments on technology and the future.
gu wrote:Honest question: Why are you still using Squirrel Mail? I'm seriously not trying to be an a-hole, I just want to understand.

In my opinion, there are far easier and more efficient ways to access email, including macOS's Mail, Sonic's other Webmail platform (webmail.sonic.net), and even Alpine through the Unix shell, so I'm just curious why anyone would still want to use Squirrel Mail.

Cheers,
-g-
by spencerw » Fri May 05, 2023 11:23 am
We are sorry to hear about this experience. I have been unable to replicate this issue, it loads normally for me, but I have passed this report to the systems team to double check. Squirrelmail is a legacy product so we appreciate patience while troubleshooting issues with it.
Spencer W.
Community and Escalations Specialist
Sonic
by jilbrown » Wed Jun 28, 2023 3:04 pm
We are now at the end of June 2023. Squirrel mail is still slow. It doesn't matter if on a mac or pc; it doesn't matter if safari, firefox, chrome, edge or opera; it doesn't matter if on my home network through sonci or 200 miles north of Santa Rosa on suddenlink. Now it takes a minimum of 5 minutes to get from the login page into the directory; it works fast once this initial load time. Roundcube is fine, it is just Squirrel. I believe it is the server side misconfiguration for authentications.
by kevan.benson » Thu Jun 29, 2023 6:12 pm
Can you confirm which account/mailbox you're checking with? A few minute delay isn't normal I just checked with a couple different mailboxes I have, once with ~500MB of mail in ~4000 messags, and it loaded within a second or two in squirrelmail, another with over 5GB of email in 43k messages, and it also loaded almost immediately (even faster than the first one, since I use this one often so the data was likely cached on the mail servers).

It's possible that during the upgrade some default settings might have changed, or a setting you chose might have been lost. One of the settings that can cause significant slowdowns in larger spools is whether you're using a threaded view and also whether it's server side threading or not. Clicking on the link to show a threaded view in my spool did lock it up for quite a while (actually, so long that it timed out), but that's also to be expected if there is a lot of mail and it has to see it all to determine if it should group them into a thread or not when you can't keep a local copy like a desktop mail client.

If you are in a threaded view (where email is grouped by subjects and/or other indicators it's related to prior messages), maybe try switching off the threaded view as a test to see if it changes how quickly it loads. If it does, I suggest either using the non-threaded display, or possibly trying out the newer roundcube webmail which has options for server side threading, which may be much faster. There's also the option of making folders and moving older mail from your inbox into those folder(s), which reduces the total amount of email that the webmail client has to deal with in the main inbox, which might result in good performance in a threaded view if it's reduced enough.
- Sonic Systems Operations
by jilbrown » Wed Jul 05, 2023 7:46 am
Turned threading off, log out, log in. Same sluggish pace during login and it reset my setting change. My total mailbox is about 1.8GB and 3,300 files in about 40 'folders'. This should not be too much to slow down the login and access that much. I agree that something changed at the SERVER side for my account. I will need to have a tech on the phone and monitor my login to prove this problem. Roundcube works okay. Inbox has less than 200 messages. The system acts like it is downloading the whole volume of my mailbox (1.8GB) each and every time.
by brandonc » Wed Jul 05, 2023 11:03 am
I'm sorry to hear that you're still experiencing issues with SquirrelMail. Please call our tech support team at (707)-547-3400 at your convenience; we're open from 8am-10pm every day of the week.

I hope we hear from you soon.

Kind regards,
Brandon C.
Community and Escalations
Sonic
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