Re: [Evolution] Searching emails?

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

On Sun, 2011-02-27 at 22:23 +0100, Thomas Novin wrote: 
> On Thu, 2011-02-24 at 06:12 +0100, Thomas Mittelstaedt wrote:
> > Am Mittwoch, den 23.02.2011, 15:49 +0100 schrieb Thomas Novin:
> > > Hello
> > >
> > > I constantly have a need for searching through my emails. For my Gmail
> > > account I usually go to Gmail Webmail which has a very advanced way of
> > > doing this (if you know the search filters) and it's extremely fast.
> > >
> > > For my other account which is an IMAP-connection to an Exchange-server I
> > > can only search from within Evolution. Since the search function is
> > > limited, 

Does Exchange's IMAP support SEARCH? [Honestly, I have no idea].  Cyrus
IMAP supports SEARCH and full-text indexing of mailbox content - so
server side search is *FAST* and efficient.  I've seen significant
differences in SEARCH implementations over the years between various
IMAP servers (and versions of IMAP servers, and configurations of IMAP
servers).

> > What do you mean by "limited"?
> No so much limited by number of searches you can do, more that I find
> that it often doesn't work or is extremely slow. I just now did a  body
> search for 'distributed' in "Current Accounts". After 5 minutes I shut
> down Evolution because I didn't want to wait any longer. No real CPU
> usage either so I doubt much was going on.

It would be interesting to see the telemetry on such a request;  is
Evolution asking the server to search the mailbox or downloading the
required data of all candidate messages in order to search locally? [if
the later then no wonder it is slow - and your grep-test, while fast,
will be inaccurate].

According to the go-evolution Wiki:
<quote>
Searching is implemented using a customised
Camel.Search#Camel.FolderSearch object. Since most search operations
work against the Camel.FolderSummary, those are unaltered, but the
(body-contains ...) search is overridden, and sent to the server using
the UID SEARCH command. 
</quote>

> Then instead did the search with grep. In < 5 secs it was done with two
> matches.

But, again, this assumes that the mail is local.  A fast, and
incorrect/incomplete, response is worth much.