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