Re: Indexing Gnus (and other...) mails

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
that has been posted to gnu.emacs.gnus as well.

On Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:46:32 +0200 egallego@babel.ls.fi.upm.es (Emilio Jesús Gallego Arias) wrote: 

EJGA> Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org> writes:
>> You could try mairix (+ the gnus nnmairix backend).  According to its
>> homepage, it should be quite fast while indexing.  (But still 30GB is
>> quite a lot...)

EJGA> I couldn't be happier with mairix (just 10Gb of email tough)

EJGA> In fact, it is so fast that I use it to simulate "Gmail" like
EJGA> threads. Just index your sent mails archive and search for a subject,
EJGA> mairix will create a group with all the mails.

This made me think about IMAP specifically.

Gnus (imap.el AFAICT, so the support is missing all the way down) does
not support the IMAP SEARCH command, except by UID.  It probably should
allow SEARCH by TEXT, FROM, TO, SUBJECT, and probably all the other
standard search keys in RFC 3501 (section 6.4.4) [1].

I don't know how IMAP servers implement SEARCH.  Is the speed decent?
If not, that should be an issue for the server maintainers (or they can
allow search plugins, so things like mairix can be integrated).  It
seems to me that IMAP SEARCH is a good way to provide universal
searching in Gnus for IMAP backends.

Obviously mairix (with nnmairix) is still useful, and perhaps Gnus
should have backend searching capabilities that go beyond just limiting
the full list of articles.  But IMAP SEARCH support seems to me to be an
essential piece of building a good Gnus search solution that doesn't
depend on mairix or any other search tools, but can use them when they
are available.

Ideas?  Suggestions?  Did I overlook something?

Thanks
Ted

[1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3501.txt