Feature Request: Support Server Side Searches

[tanstaafl]

Hi Iago,

This feature would be an incredible boon for anyone who has an IMAP account that uses Dovecot or Cyrus for the server. Both of these provide full server side indexing of all messages.

In Thunderbird, currently the only way to perform server side searches is in the Advanced Search Window, which I (and most people I know who use Thunderbird) rarely if ever use.

It would be awesome if Unified Search could somehow leverage Thunderbirds ability to do server side searches, but that would obviously depend on how easy or hard it would be for you to hook into it and make it available through the Unified Search box.

One problem I can think of is, it would need to work on a per account basis, since not all IMAP servers support server side indexing (Courier is one, and I don't know about gmail)... or, maybe, you could just come up with a new key combo for perform a server side search, then make a config option to define which search is the default and which uses the alternate key combo. Currently, you have SHIFT-ENTER to apply a Global Search, so how about ALT-ENTER for the default Server-Side Search, but provide a config option to swap the default, so that the user could decide which is the default behavior?

Anyway, just trying to think of ways to make Unified Search better...

Thanks again for all you do!

[IagoSRL]

Hi,

Thanks for continue contributing! Sorry my delays, now I have no time to work on the extension (I hope soon!, but I cannot ensure, I wanted to solve some blocking problems and released 0.7 series at AMO, but I could not yet).

About this feature request, it seems difficult to implement it in a short time; Unified Search now is only an interface to raise the Thunderbird filtering system, doesn't do the filtering itself.

I suppose you use filtering with the 'body' option checked, I say this because without this option Thunderbird filtering is very fast (do a in-memory search, the fastest!), but with it the search really is too much slow, and require using the 'enable search index' option to be some more quick, but is (depending on the computer) not so fast like some server-side-searches like you say.

Thanks!