Cyrus Daboo wrote:
Hi Ken,
--On December 1, 2005 9:20:09 AM -0500 Ken Murchison
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The other thing that gmail and Zimbra offer, seems to me, is seamless
searching across folders. Not sure how/if Cyrus could deal with that
since seems to me to be largely a client issue.
There has been (still is?) discussion of an MSEARCH command which does
searching across folders. The undocumented SCAN command which is used by
Pine and UW IMAP is a LIST variant which will search or a string and
return the mailboxes (NOT messages) in which the string occurs. This can
help a client narrow its focus for the necessary SEARCHes. I have a
working patch to add SCAN to Cyrus which I may get back to.
Searching across multiple folders is only one half of the problem. The
other problem is presenting a view of the search results in an efficient
manner, given that the results may span multiple mailboxes.
Unfortunately IMAP's selected state behaviour (which means only one
mailbox can be open at a time on one connection) makes this really hard
to do.
One option that comes to mind is to create a 'virtual folder' extension
that allows specific messages from multiple mailboxes to be collected
together into a single 'mailbox' view such that operations on messages
in that 'mailbox' affect the message state in the message's actual
mailbox. The 'virtual folder' could then be 'populated' via an MSEARCH
command. To avoid the problems encountered in the abortive IMAP VIEW
extension we would restrict the 'virtual folders' to a static behaviour
- i.e. the set of messages in the virtual folder does not automatically
update if the original MSEARCH results were to change as a result of
someone else changing message state.
Right. We'll see what the LEMONADE folks (which [un]fortunately
includes us) come up with in this area.
--
Kenneth Murchison
Systems Programmer
Carnegie Mellon University
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