[Dovecot] Please advise on very fast search

[Timo Sirainen]

On Wed, 2011-11-09 at 16:57 +0300, Alexander Chekalin wrote:

> The problem is that when my archive become big (several years), it 
> appears to be painful to find specified message(s). When someone 
> suddenly needs to find his/her old message, it is mostly guesses like 'I 
> think the message was between june and july of 2009, or maybe month or 
> two before that', so I need to search all mailboxes (with 1000's 
> messages in each). And it takes really long time.
> 
> 
> I tried to play with Dovecot indexes, but it won't help too much. 

They'll help with the dates.

> The 
> bad part is that I need to search for all emails in each message 
> headers, not only for "From" or "To", since some messages are sent to 
> maillists soe "To" = list address, not person's personal email.

Headers only, not message body? Anyway, some of the full text search
backends would support searching from both. I'd recommend using either
Solr or with Dovecot v2.1 you can also use Lucene:
http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Plugins/FTS