Re: searching speedup?

[Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no>]

>>>>> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>:

> Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> writes:

>> I often use G G to search a group.  With most imap servers,
>> e.g. Google's gmail, this works really well.  However, with Microsoft's
>> outlook.office365.com exchange server accessed as an imap server, it
>> takes a very long time (minutes) to satisfy the search
>> request.  Annoyingly, if I use the web interface for this server,
>> searches are fast.  It's only through imap that they are slow, it would
>> seem.

> My guess is that outlook is building an index for the web interface that
> isn't available for the IMAP server. Unfortunately you can't do anything
> about that -- when issuing an IMAP SEARCH command, only the server knows
> if a search index is available or not. It's possible that there is an
> index but it's gotten corrupted, but then you'd expect the web interface
> to be slow too. It's more likely that they've done one for the web, but
> neglected IMAP.

Here's a possible workaround: use davmail
 http://davmail.sourceforge.net

Davmail accesses the Exchange web interface and exposes it as IMAP (and
SMTP and caldav and LDAP).

A theoretical downside to this, is that the IMAP operation here should
be much slower than using the Exchange IMAP directly (since you first
access the folders using the web interface, and then get the IMAP
traffic).  However, if the IMAP support of Exchange is as neglected as
it seems to be, then this may not actually be the case.

And if you're lucky, searching through davmail IMAP would utilize the
FAST search that the web interface enjoys.