Spaces and IMAP searching with Cyrus

[Ted Cabeen]

Rob Siemborski <rjs3 at andrew.cmu.edu> writes:

> On Fri, 28 May 2004, Ted Cabeen wrote:
>
>> A number of my users have been reporting problems with searching.  It
>> seems like the Cyrus server is totally ignoring whitespace when
>> performing searches.  This behavior causes quite a few false positives
>> in my searches.  For example, a search for "logo" will return messages
>> with the following subject: "Log of changes for ws....".  This can
>> make it very hard to find some messages.  Is it possible to
>> reconfigure Cyrus to not match results that cross word boundaries or
>> to respect spaces?  This behavior is pretty non-intuitive.
>
> No, it is not possible without changing the code.  In many cases, its
> better to give too many search results than too few.

How substantial of a code change would it be?  I might be up for
writing a patch if it didn't require widespread changes to the caching
and database systems, which is probably over my head.

> Of course, were are fast approaching the day where the search and sort
> comparitors will require that we do stringprep on all the strings, and
> that day will be very sad.

When that day comes, will this no longer be a problem?  How long is
"fast approaching"?

-- 
Ted Cabeen           http://www.pobox.com/~secabeen            ted at impulse.net 
Check Website or Keyserver for PGP/GPG Key BA0349D2         secabeen at pobox.com
"I have taken all knowledge to be my province." -F. Bacon  secabeen at cabeen.org
"Human kind cannot bear very much reality."-T.S.Eliot        cabeen at netcom.com

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