[Dovecot] better body and text search?

[Mark Anderson]

(this is a resend, sorry if duplicate but my first post didn't get through).

I was wondering what plans dovecot has for text and body search?

This is one of those issues that *no* imap implementation ever
seems to document :(.
Not cyrus, courier, bincimap, or dovecot....

i speed-read some of the sources and found src/lib-mail/message-body-search.c
After a quick scan, it seems:
- it uses no text index at all, but does a linear search over the folder.
- it searches only messages with content-type starting with "text/" or "message/"
- it does no special parsing of "text/html", so tags and attributes would match
- it appears to exclude any mime messages, since it skips "multipart/mixed" for example.
- it does deal with content encoding and charset.

There is a lucene-based text indexing utility for IMAP stores here:
http://www.tropo.com/techno/java/lucene/imap.html

But ideally there would be pluggable text indexing builtin....

-mda