[imapfilter-devel] Re: Not filtering

[Lefteris Chatzibarbas]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2003 at 04:56:01AM -0700, Chris de Vidal wrote:
> --- Lefteris Chatzibarbas <lefcha at hellug.gr> wrote:
> > > "Database is not full-text indexed."  Ideas on how I can work with this?
> > 
> > Yes, this is an IMAP server problem.
> > 
> > I am only speculating, but there should be a way to create a full-text
> > index of the database, in order for the IMAP server to be able to handle
> > SEARCH queries.  If you are the admin of the IMAP server you should
> > check it's documentation about full-text indexing, etc.  Otherwise you
> > should contact the mail server's admin about this problem.
> 
> I'll contact him.  The server has thousands of users... perhaps he disabled
> indexing for performance.

This server, configured in a way that it cannot handle SEARCH queries,
is not compliant to the IMAP4rev1 protocol and creates problems to IMAP
mail clients (such as imapfilter).  The admin of the mail server should
configure the server properly and IMHO "performance reasons" is not a
good excuse...

> There must be another way to sort IMAP mail if Mozilla can do it.

If the server can not handle SEARCH queries from clients, that means the
mozilla mail client fetches some or all of the headers of the messages
and checks them locally (or maybe configured to fetch the messages and
also keep them on the server).  This is much more slower if you tend
keep a lot of messages in your remote IMAP mailboxes and don't have
broadband connection.

> Have you heard of any other mutt-compatible software which can filter IMAP
> mail?

I don't know any, but I can't tell I have searched.  Maybe someone else
has something in mind.

> Or could you please provide an alternate way of sorting for non-indexed servers?

I am thinking of adding the capability to use regular expressions to the
filters of imapfilter (not for the next major release though), but this
has the drawback that then some part of the messages have to be fetched
in order to do the matching (because IMAP mail servers don't have the
capability to do searching queries using RE).  OTOH, this will solve
problems like this, make filtering more powerful, and will also make it
easy to implement things like the "delete duplicates" functionality...