[Dovecot] Disable/patch iOS7 Full Body Search
As mentioned in other posts [1], iOS7 Mail App uses a multi-folder full body search by default. As to my knowledge, this behavior cannot be disabled within the Mail App.
Is there any way to disable/patch this behavior on the server side? My users complain that searching now takes 'forever'. They were happy with the old behavior (searching From/To/Subject only).
I do NOT want to setup/maintain a dovecot FTS. I just want to have the 'old' behavior.
Chris
[1 ]http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/09/17/ios-7-mail-app-uses-multi-folder-body-sea... ("Our plan at FastMail is to detect iOS clients, and convert all searches into FUZZY searches.")
Hi, I wonder if anyone has done some research on this subject. Apple users are complaining loudly [1] about being not able to search the inbox since Apple did not change the brain-dead full-body-search-behaviour in iOS 7.1.
Chris
[1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5323188?start=30&tstart=0
On Sat, Feb 22, 2014 at 11:21 AM, Chris Laif <chris.laif@googlemail.com> wrote:
As mentioned in other posts [1], iOS7 Mail App uses a multi-folder full body search by default. As to my knowledge, this behavior cannot be disabled within the Mail App.
Is there any way to disable/patch this behavior on the server side? My users complain that searching now takes 'forever'. They were happy with the old behavior (searching From/To/Subject only).
I do NOT want to setup/maintain a dovecot FTS. I just want to have the 'old' behavior.
Chris
[1 ]http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/09/17/ios-7-mail-app-uses-multi-folder-body-sea... ("Our plan at FastMail is to detect iOS clients, and convert all searches into FUZZY searches.")
In article <CALDaGLbbJTaGtK7bqY2itUWxnU09gnERW5DqDvNihCeszOqN6Q@mail.gmail.com>, Chris Laif <chris.laif@googlemail.com> wrote:
Hi, I wonder if anyone has done some research on this subject. Apple users are complaining loudly [1] about being not able to search the inbox since Apple did not change the brain-dead full-body-search-behaviour in iOS 7.1.
There don't seem to be any notable changes in iOS 7.1. iOS Mail still opens lots of simultaneous IMAP connections, eventually complains about not being able to contact the server, and doesn't seem to do anything that uses Dovecot's search indexes.
I posted about this a few days ago:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.mail.imap.dovecot/76613
but did not hear from anyone else who has had success getting Dovecot searches from iOS 7 to be performant. This was disappointing as I spent quite a bit of time getting Lucene FTS set up, because Timo had mentioned a few months ago that it should help.
I don't do this for a living — I'm just maintaining a Dovecot server with a couple of users, but I do happen to have an iPhone and iPad with iOS 7 and like to search my email from time to time.
Nicholas Riley <njriley@illinois.edu>
Nicholas,
I think the problem has nothing to do with the number of connections iOS7 opens to the server.I do not get any warnings about too many connections and the problem still persists.
I think the problem is the way iOS7 builds the search request (pure sub-string search vs. fuzzy search, see fastmail.fm's blog post). The pure sub-string search seems *not* to use dovecot's FTS at all :-(
But that's just guessing from my side, would be nice if any of the experts could enlighten the situation. Timo, we need you ;-)
Chris
On 3/11/2014 7:03 PM, Nicholas Riley <njriley@illinois.edu> wrote:
In article <CALDaGLbbJTaGtK7bqY2itUWxnU09gnERW5DqDvNihCeszOqN6Q@mail.gmail.com>, Chris Laif <chris.laif@googlemail.com> wrote:
Hi, I wonder if anyone has done some research on this subject. Apple users are complaining loudly [1] about being not able to search the inbox since Apple did not change the brain-dead full-body-search-behaviour in iOS 7.1. There don't seem to be any notable changes in iOS 7.1. iOS Mail still opens lots of simultaneous IMAP connections, eventually complains about not being able to contact the server, and doesn't seem to do anything that uses Dovecot's search indexes.
I posted about this a few days ago:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.mail.imap.dovecot/76613
but did not hear from anyone else who has had success getting Dovecot searches from iOS 7 to be performant. This was disappointing as I spent quite a bit of time getting Lucene FTS set up, because Timo had mentioned a few months ago that it should help.
I don't do this for a living — I'm just maintaining a Dovecot server with a couple of users, but I do happen to have an iPhone and iPad with iOS 7 and like to search my email from time to time.
This is concerning to me, so I've CC'd Mike Abbot from Apple (participates on this list from time to time and helps Timo fix things).
Most of our users have held off on the iOS7 update, but some haven't, and it won't be too long I imagine before most have updated (either via getting new devices, or just taking the plunge).
Mike?
--
Best regards,
Charles
In traversing this thread I see a few different issues being reported. In no particular order I see:
[Nicholas Riley]
iOS Mail still opens lots of simultaneous IMAP connections, eventually complains about not being able to contact the server, and doesn't seem to do anything that uses Dovecot's search indexes.
This seems to have nothing to do with searching per se but it's hard to tell anything without thorough steps to reproduce the issue and/or detailed activity logs. Packet traces capturing all traffic between the client and the server during such an episode would be helpful. (Limited to the issue at hand though. A huge dump of hours of traffic would not be useful. Beware revealing private information.) And if you suspect that your clients are hitting your mail_max_userip_connections setting why not just increase it?
[http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/09/17/ios-7-mail-app-uses-multi-folder-body-sea...]
Depending on your IMAP server, your message bodies may or may not be indexed in a way that allows sub-string searching.
RFC 3501 section 6.4.4 unequivocally requires substring matches: In all search keys that use strings, a message matches the key if the string is a substring of the field. I would suggest that an IMAP server whose search indexes don't support efficient substring matches is misconfigured. Imagine a server which indexes only occurrences of the word "potato." Would you be surprised when it performs poorly when searching for other foods?
[https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5323188]
Apple turned all server-side email searching into a slow and inefficient entire msgs substring search
Personally I consider searching message bodies a feature. Anecdotally it works great for me with my iOS device and personal mail accounts. But again, server-side searching is only "slow and inefficient" in the absence of a properly configured search subsystem. Note these (dated, but still relevant) documents:
[http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Plugins/FTS/Solr] * break-imap-search : Use Solr also for indexing TEXT and BODY searches. This makes your server non-IMAP-compliant. (This is always enabled in v2.1+) [http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Plugins/FTS/Squat] By strictly reading the IMAP RFC it requires substring matching, so to optimize regular TEXT and BODY searches you must use Squat with Dovecot v2.0.
participants (4)
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Charles Marcus
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Chris Laif
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Mike Abbott
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Nicholas Riley