More robust INDEXing

[Kjetil Torgrim Homme]

On Sun, 2006-04-30 at 16:26 -0400, Forrest Aldrich wrote:
> Slightly OT: however, there are a few programs out there that offer a 
> richer indexing method (a la Google for your email).
> 
> I wonder if there's a place for that somewhere in the Cyrus structure. 
> There's obvious utility in a richer search-and-find method.

you don't seem to be familiar with squatter, which does full text search
for Cyrus.  I can search a gigabyte of mail in a couple of seconds (my
e-mail client is Evolution, but I imagine Thunderbird will send off the
IMAP body search command just as well.)

squatter is far from perfect, though -- it runs periodically, ie. at
night[1], and indexes everything afresh each time.  this is a
significant I/O load for an IMAP server, and it may not run to
completion during the night on a large server.  the index itself will
also be almost the same size as the mailbox.

[1] Cyrus will do brute force search for the messages not in the
squatter index, so you won't miss messages in your search.

squatter index can be enabled on a folder by folder basis by setting an
annotation on the folder.
-- 
Kjetil T.