 maybe i batch messages using fetchmail don t ask why and adding NUMBER seconds per message for a batch of NUMBER not untypical feels like a real wait to me yeesh sounds like what you need is something to kick up once and score an entire mailbox wait a second so that s why you wanted u if you can spare the memory you might get better performance in this case using the pickle store since it only has to go to disk once but boy does it ever go to disk i can t think of anything obvious to speed things up once it s all loaded into memory though that s profiler territory and profiling is exactly the kind of optimization i just said i wasn t going to do we could have a server mode someone described this as an sa option guido van rossum home page URL 