[Mulberry-discuss] Mulberry-discuss Digest, Vol 87, Issue 3

[David Gessel]

Another curious request: I've seen some indication that server side search is folder specific and if I understood it, there's no straightforward "search the user's whole mailstore" function. I think TB has some folder traversal process that gets you there. Server side indexed search, for example with Clucene indexing dovecot, is nearly instantaneous and brings Google equivalent performance to small-cache mobile clients, but my results with K9 so far seem to show folder-by-folder results, which isn't quite what I'm usually looking for.

Is this an IMAP feature/limitation or a client feature/limit?

-David

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1. Re: Anticipatory header download (Cyrus Daboo)
2. Re: Anticipatory header download (Tanstaafl)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Tue, 12 May 2015 09:44:01 -0400
Subject: Re: [Mulberry-discuss] Anticipatory header download
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Hi Tanstaafl,
--On May 12, 2015 at 9:21:55 AM -0400 Tanstaafl

What happens if you perform a search on a huge mailstore that only

has a

few message headers downloaded? I'm truly curious...

Mulberry makes use of IMAP's server-side features such as searching,
sorting and threading. In theory a client does not have to download
anything from the server before doing a search - once a search is done
it
only needs to download information for messages returned in the
results.
The same goes for sorting and threading. This is one of the key
features in
the original design of IMAP - the goal being to give thin/constrained
clients a cheap and efficient way to interact with large mail stores.
Today
technology has moved on quite a bit, but even so, some of those
original
design goals are still relevant, e.g., there are mobile clients that do
partial caching of mailboxes and then initially do a local search of
cached
messages, but then offer the user an option to "search on server" if
the
local results are not sufficient.
--
Cyrus Daboo
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Tue, 12 May 2015 10:12:44 -0400
Subject: Re: [Mulberry-discuss] Anticipatory header download
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252

Mulberry makes use of IMAP's server-side features such as searching,
sorting and threading. In theory a client does not have to download
anything from the server before doing a search - once a search is

done it

only needs to download information for messages returned in the

results.

The same goes for sorting and threading. This is one of the key

features in

the original design of IMAP - the goal being to give thin/constrained
clients a cheap and efficient way to interact with large mail stores.

Today

technology has moved on quite a bit, but even so, some of those

original

design goals are still relevant, e.g., there are mobile clients that

do

partial caching of mailboxes and then initially do a local search of

cached

messages, but then offer the user an option to "search on server" if

the

local results are not sufficient.

Interesting! That is a very pertinent point that I had forgotten about
during this conversation.
Now that you have jogged my memory, I did create an enhancement request
for TB a long time ago to provide real server side search support. It
does have it, but since there is no way in TB to not download all of
the
headers, there is no way to test it in that scenario.
I think I will go create the enhancement request for limiting how much
is downloaded, and link it to my server-side search support request,
and
see what the response is.
Thanks for thinking this through with me... :)
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[Cyrus Daboo]

Hi David,

--On May 12, 2015 at 1:58:21 PM -0400 David Gessel

Post by David Gessel
Another curious request: I've seen some indication that server side
search is folder specific and if I understood it, there's no
straightforward "search the user's whole mailstore" function. I think TB
has some folder traversal process that gets you there. Server side
indexed search, for example with Clucene indexing dovecot, is nearly
instantaneous and brings Google equivalent performance to small-cache
mobile clients, but my results with K9 so far seem to show
folder-by-folder results, which isn't quite what I'm usually looking for.
Is this an IMAP feature/limitation or a client feature/limit?

There is a relatively new (2011) IMAP extension to support searching across
multiple mailboxes. I am not sure how widely supported that is on either
servers or clients, though I do see it listed in the capabilities of my
home (dovecot) server. Look for "ESEARCH" in capabilities.

[David Gessel]

Thanks Cyrus! Sounds like it was finalized after the latest version of Mulberry. Maybe for the next big release?

Post by Cyrus Daboo
Hi David,
--On May 12, 2015 at 1:58:21 PM -0400 David Gessel

Post by David Gessel
Another curious request: I've seen some indication that server side
search is folder specific and if I understood it, there's no
straightforward "search the user's whole mailstore" function. I

think TB

Post by David Gessel
has some folder traversal process that gets you there. Server side
indexed search, for example with Clucene indexing dovecot, is nearly
instantaneous and brings Google equivalent performance to small-cache
mobile clients, but my results with K9 so far seem to show
folder-by-folder results, which isn't quite what I'm usually looking

for.

Post by David Gessel
Is this an IMAP feature/limitation or a client feature/limit?

There is a relatively new (2011) IMAP extension to support searching across
multiple mailboxes. I am not sure how widely supported that is on either
servers or clients, though I do see it listed in the capabilities of my
home (dovecot) server. Look for "ESEARCH" in capabilities.