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

[Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org>]

Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org> writes:

Hi!

>> 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?
>
> I use a local dovecot server and it doesn't index anything except
> message ids.  When I search for something (using nnir) it'll take
> quite a long time for large groups and it constantly accesses the
> filesystem.  I guess something like grep is used here.

Oh, this is plain wrong!  It's very slow for searching the BODY, but all
(or at least the important ones) are indexed by dovecot out of the box.
Searching for let's say a word in the subject takes about 2-3 secs on my
emacs-devel folder with about 20000 messages.

And for speading up searches in the whole message including BODY,
dovecot offers plugins:

  http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/FTS

So I'd love to see a better support for IMAP SEARCH in Gnus.  nnir
works, but sometimes it's a bit humpy.  For example if I search for a
string the second time each result message appears two times in the
search result group.

And what bothers me most: When I want to see a result message in the
original group (I want to reply using the groups posting styles and
parameters) I hit G T on the message (gnus-summary-nnir-goto-thread) but
then I'm queried for my username / password for the local imap server.
Those informations are already in my .authinfo...

Bye,
Tassilo
-- 
A child of five could understand this! Fetch me a child of five!