G'day.

Gnus contains, in contrib/, the nnir.el interface to search engines.
This is a nice tool and, pleasantly, supports IMAP SEARCH to give me
efficient searching of my IMAP mail ... or so I thought.

The biggest problem I had was that it would never seem to find the mail
I expected, so I didn't use it much.  

After inspecting the code the reason became clear: the search was a
single "exact substring" match performed, not the logical sort of search
that I have come to expect with Google and other search engines.


So...  the IMAP SEARCH command doesn't do any clever parsing or
anything; the front end software has to do that.  

Attached is my first "draft" of a more complex search front-end for NNIR
and IMAP SEARCH -- it parses the query, translates that into a suitable
IMAP SEARCH command and returns the results.


This is *much* less surprising to me: it returns what I expect, most of
the time, and takes the sort of input I would expect as well.


At the moment it only handles basic searching, as documented in the
`nnir-imap-make-query' function in the patch.

I plan to extend this to support the full range of operators that IMAP
SEARCH supports, but wanted to seek feedback on the initial
implementation first.


I have signed papers assigning Gnus changes already, so there should be
no legal reason that this is rejected.

Regards,
        Daniel
-- 
Daniel Pittman <daniel@cybersource.com.au>           Phone: 03 9621 2377
Level 4, 10 Queen St, Melbourne             Web: http://www.cyber.com.au
Cybersource: Australia's Leading Linux and Open Source Solutions Company