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

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

Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:

Hi Ted,

> 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
> EJGA> subject, 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?

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.

Bye,
Tassilo
-- 
No person,  no idea, and no  religion deserves to be  illegal to insult,
not even the Church of Emacs. (Richard M. Stallman)