Re: nnir: subject search finds matches, whole message search doesn't

[Tassilo Horn <tsdh@gnu.org>]

"Herbert J. Skuhra" <herbert@gojira.at> writes:

> On Sun, Jun 07, 2020 at 10:12:57AM +0200, Tassilo Horn wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I was just wondering why a subject search for a given term finds matches
>> whereas the whole message search does not?  Doesn't "whole message" not
>> include the subject?
>> 
>> This is with IMAP.  Where do I have to look which actual requests are
>> sent to the server?  Maybe it's an issue on the other end...
>
> +-----
> nnimap-record-commands is a variable defined in ‘nnimap.el’.
> Its value is nil
>
>   This variable may be risky if used as a file-local variable.
>
> Documentation:
> If non-nil, log commands to the "*imap log*" buffer.
> +-----

Ok, so this is a successful subject search:

  UID SEARCH SUBJECT "text" SUBJECT "quotes"
  UID FETCH 173542,173554,173564,173728,174322,174333,174351,174396:174397 (UID RFC822.SIZE BODYSTRUCTURE BODY.PEEK[HEADER.FIELDS (Subject From Date Message-Id References In-Reply-To Xref To Cc Keywords Gcc Newsgroups X-GM-LABELS)])

And that's the full text search which fails:

  UID SEARCH TEXT "text" TEXT "quotes"
  NO Search taking too long - try reducing the set of messages searched

And indeed, the search takes about 20 seconds before stopping.  And now
after doing the same search in the Fastmail web interface leading to
thousands of results I realized that it searched for any message which
has both text and quotes somewhere in my emacs-devel group.  Obviously,
there are many such messages.

I actually wanted to search for the exact string "text quote".  I just
learned that I get this result when I type in the query with
double-quotes and then the search finishes and finds what I was looking
for.

Bye,
Tassilo