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 13:19:02 -0500 Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> wrote: 

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

Well, I mistyped "grep -i seach *.el" and assumed there was no IMAP
SEARCH support.  Sorry about the confusion--I was wrong.

nnir is the backend that implements search at the highest level in Gnus.
nnmairix is independent of it, but could probably be converted to a nnir
backend.  There are some TODO items with nnir as Tassilo pointed out,
with duplicate searches being a pretty big one.

Finally, nnir doesn't support incremental results AFAICT, which are
important for people with 30 GB of mail.  It would be nice if it did.
In general Gnus backends do very little incrementally, and that causes
problems with entering large groups and elsewhere, not just searching.

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

If anyone has experience integrating mairix with Courier or Dovecot,
please let me know.

Ted