On Tuesday 24 June 2008, Timo Sirainen wrote:
Yes, they have to be selected. There isn't any way currently in IMAP to search from multiple mailboxes using a single command, so even if Dovecot implemented a Squat index that indexed mails from all mailboxes, you'd still have to implement a non-standard extension to use that.
I see. That's what I thought. :(
Hmm. Or v1.2 has virtual mailboxes - you could create a single virtual mailbox from all your other mailboxes and then search it. I think if Squat is enabled it'll create a single index from all the mails. I'm not sure if I want to leave it like that though..
How about making it configurable? I'm sure there are scenarios where it's not desirable to have an index for each virtual mailbox (which sounds like a very cool concept, by the way) - but like in my case, it would be a great workaround :)
I have also been thinking about making Squat indexes global for all mailboxes. If done well it should reduce disk space as well as enable fast multi-mailbox searches, but I'm a bit worried about memory usage and other slowness when updating the index. The Squat building/updating could use more work, but I haven't yet figured out a great solution for it.
I'm not sure if it would reduce disk space usage... I'm thinking of the following:
Now (fictitious, don't know how dovecot.index.search really looks like):
mailbox1.in.a.subfolder.of.a.subfolder.of.a.subfolder/dovecot.index.search: INDEX UID word 12345 ord 12345 rd 12345 d 12345 ...
Then (of course also fictitious):
dovecot.global.index.search: INDEX MAILBOX UID word mailbox1.in.a.subfolder.of.a.subfolder.of.a.subfolder 12345 ord mailbox1.in.a.subfolder.of.a.subfolder.of.a.subfolder 12345 rd mailbox1.in.a.subfolder.of.a.subfolder.of.a.subfolder 12345 d mailbox1.in.a.subfolder.of.a.subfolder.of.a.subfolder 12345 ...
Of course this would be very compressible, but in an uncompressed form it would probably be much bigger than now all dovecot.index.search files together. This would cause the need for mailbox UIDs, so that the path names only need to be stored in a map once... or something along those lines.
Anyway, I think improved (= faster) search capabilities are a huge plus for an IMAP server, because the possibility to search in old mails is what makes people keep their mails (available, on the server) in the first place...
Patrick.
-- STAR Software (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. http://www.star-group.net/ Phone: +86 (21) 3462 7688 x 826 Fax: +86 (21) 3462 7779
PGP key: https://stshacom1.star-china.net/keys/patrick_nagel.asc Fingerprint: E09A D65E 855F B334 E5C3 5386 EF23 20FC E883 A005