[Dovecot] testing fts-solr?

[Charles Marcus]

On 2012-03-05 9:48 AM, Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> wrote:
> On 5.3.2012, at 13.24, Charles Marcus wrote:
>> Thunderbird has a 'Quickfilter Toolbar' with a little searchbox
>> that applies a filter of the current folder message view pane (to
>> show you only messages in the pane that meet the criteria
>> specified). The default criteria that are selected are just
>> 'Sender', 'Recipients' and 'Subject', but you can also select
>> 'Body' (and a few others like 'Unread', 'Contain attachments',
>> etc), but the 'Body' criteria is the one that would want/need to
>> use the fts indexes, so...
>>
>> Can dovecots fts indexes be used in a case like this? In other
>> words, will it 'just work'? Or will it *not* work? Or, would the
>> client need to specify the folder in the commands it sends to
>> limit the search and/or results to just the currently selected
>> folder? Or is this even possible for such a simple/limited use
>> filtering mechanism?

> The regular IMAP protocol supports searching only from the selected
> folder.

Interesting, thanks... so, just guessing, most likely Thunderbird simply 
iterates over each folder in an account when searching an entire account 
and 'Run search on server' is checked (only available in the Advanced 
Search window)...

One last question then (couldn't find an answer on the wiki)...

I'm currently planning on using fts/clucene, but I'm thinking I'd like 
the following to apply also to dovecots internal indexes too...

What is the minimal number of characters that dovecots indexes are based 
on (I'm assuming that it doesn't index just individual characters)? 2+? 
3+? Is this configurable?

The reason I ask is, Thunderbird has an annoying behavior where it sends 
a new/separate query each time a character is typed, beginning with the 
very first character:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541400

This causes massive performance degradation on my clients system that 
currently uses Courier-IMAP (this is the one we'll soon be converting to 
dovecot) when the users (usually accidentally (select the 'Body' 
criteria in the Quickfilter searchbox...

Is there a way to tell dovecot to return an *empty* result unless/until 
a query contains X+ characters (where X is some configurable number, I'm 
thinking 3 or 4)? This would pretty much neutralize/work around the 
above bug.

> But I guess this quickfilter search also searches from only the
> selected folder. So I don't see a problem.

Correct, and thanks for the confirmation...

-- 

Best regards,

Charles