[Dovecot] Search extensions

[Sean Kamath]

On Aug 18, 2012, at 7:57 PM, Timo Sirainen wrote:

> I'm thinking about adding at least one new SEARCH command extension to Dovecot: ability to search from any headers in the mail, including MIME headers in the body. So the idea is that you could somewhat quickly ask e.g. "show me all mails with pdf attachments":
> 
> a search or x-anyheader application/pdf x-anyheader .pdf
> b fetch $ bodystructure
> 
> The client can verify the results with the fetch. The "x-anyheader" can already be implemented without changes to full text search plugin, because all backends store message/MIME headers and body text separately.
> 
> So, questions for the list, especially client developers:
> 
> 1) What's a better name for x-anyheader? :)
> 
> 2) Any other ideas about search extensions you'd want to see? Maybe I could get this standardized at some point.
> 
> I think one other thing missing has been "show me messages that have attachments". I've thought about maybe creating a $hasattachments keyword for that, which the server could automatically set for new mails that it thinks has attachments (and clients can set/unset the keyword if wanted).

At work we've flipped to Google mail (I run Dovecot at home).  99.9% of the time I just cry.

Once feature of their search capability that sometimes is nice is the ability to not only see if it has an attachment (has:attachment) but the ability to search for the attachments by a specific name (filename:<text>).  That can be, and has proven, useful.  I suspect this could turn into a nightmare, however.  Ditto something like "has N attachments" (sometime I dearly wish I had at times -- I want to find that damn message with like 10 attachments).  Or math around number of attachments.

My $0.02.

Sean