Re: [Evolution] Searching emails?

[Michael Below <below judiz de>]

Am Do 24 Feb 2011 06:28:39 CET
schrieb Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org>:

> On Thu, 2011-02-24 at 11:09 +0100, Michael Below wrote: 
> > Am Do 24 Feb 2011 09:31:58 CET
> > schrieb Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>:
> > > > Any suggestions? I want a fully indexed search and would like
> > > > to be able to specify all the "common" attributes.
> > ...
> > > The other alternative is to use something like Beagle - that will
> > > index Evo messages (and just about everything else on your
> > > computer)
> > > - and in the process suck all your CPU time and memory :-)
> > > Beagle isn't the only search tool/indexer, and it's use seems to
> > > be declining in recent years, but I *know* it will index Evo
> > > messages.
> > I tried beagle, tracker & co for desktop search with little success:
>
> Agree.  
>
> Beagle is broken for some recent document formats and Evolution mail.
>
> Tracker, at least the version on openSUSE 11.3, seems broken for
> everything but plain text and markup.   It doesn't even work for PDF
> files, which really hurts. It does *index* e-mail, at least it appears
> to, but there is no way to *search* e-mail.
>
> > tracker is in the process of being transformed into a meta-service
> > expecting dbus-signals and couldn't be expected to do something as
> > menial as indexing mail folders, 
>
> I think this statement is bogus.  Tracker is a desktop search tool -
> of course it uses DBus messaging - how else would it collaborate with
> applications?  You *cannot* do effective search without collaboration
> with applications.

I have to admit that I tried this one year ago, from a Claws
Mail/MH perspective. Things may have changed. Back then, the capability
to search through e.g. mail files had been removed from Tracker, and it
relied only on applications reporting to it.

I filed a wishlist bug to support mail indexing and I was told: 
"The things have changed radically in tracker from the 0.6 times. In
0.7+ are the programs the responsibles to put data into tracker
(instead of the previous approach of tracker "discovering" the things
from the application files).

This means that this is now a bug in claws mail that should support
"export to tracker" functionality (as evolution and kmail already do
via plugins). Feel free to discuss the topic in the tracker mailing
list."

Obviously, this works only if all other programs are modified to export
their data into Tracker. Somehow, that hasn't happened yet. Recoll has a
less demanding approach, it supports some file types in the backend
(Xapian), and others are transformed into text with usual helper
programs. This is maybe an oldfashioned concept that loses some context,
but it works. 

I will gladly switch to Tracker when procmail has been modified to send
appropriate DBus signals, but I suspect this will take some time
yet... :)
 
> > Beagle is no longer developed and doesn't index Openoffice files,
> > and so on...
>
> Mmmm.  I'm pretty sure it does OpenOffice files.

Back then it didn't index Openoffice or PDF files, it was a known
problem which got fixed by removal of Beagle from Debian/Ubuntu (see
e.g. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=543867).

Michael