Conversations and search

[Albert Shih]

Le 16/08/2018 à 14:04:22+0200, Sebastian Hagedorn a écrit
Hi

>
> I have a question regarding the conversations db and how it affects (Xapian)
> search. In this GitHub issue
> (<https://github.com/cyrusimap/cyrus-imapd/issues/2376>) I was dealing with
> Xapian search always failing. The underlying reason turned out to be an
> empty conversations db. When I regenerate that user's conversations db,
> Xapian search works fine. So far, so good. But then I noticed this piece of
> documentation:
>
> <https://www.cyrusimap.org/imap/concepts/deployment/databases.html?highlight=conversations#conversations-userid-conversations>
>
> Quote: "This file contains all the message-id fields from every email that
> has been seen in the ***past three months***, mapping to the conversation
> IDs in which this message ID has been seen, and the timestamp when it was
> last seen."
>
> This raises a number of questions. What does "has been seen" mean in this
> context? And does it mean that Xapian search will always fail to find emails
> that arrived more than three months ago?? That doesn't sound very useful ...

If I'm correct (I'm new with cyrus too), the conversations DB as nothing to
do with the database of xapian.

The xapian database is some file with .glass extension and contain all the
index of all your mail. Those files stand inside

  t1searchpartition-default/FIRST_LETTER_OF_LOGIN/user/LOGIN/

The conversation database is some cyrus internal database use by cyrus to
*create* the xapian index.

In other word the three months means, if you stop the xapian index now, you
have three months to restart it or you're going to need to regenerated the
xapian database from the beginning (and that take very loooong time).

Please if it's incorrect please someone correct me.

Regards
--
Albert SHIH
DIO bâtiment 15
Observatoire de Paris
xmpp: jas at obspm.fr
Heure local/Local time:
Fri Aug 17 16:01:52 CEST 2018