On Thu, 08 Apr 2010 07:58:47 -0700, Dirk Hohndel <hohndel at infradead.org> wrote: > On Thu, 08 Apr 2010 10:03:15 -0400, Jameson Rollins <jrollins at > finestructure.net> wrote: > > Also, fwiw, the folder: indexing is probably the new feature that I'm > > most eagerly awaiting. I've got all these ideas for ways to handle sent > > mail and drafts if we can get this working. > > Maybe I am missing some context here - what exactly does 'indexing' mean > here?
Indexing here means shoving information into the database to make it searchable. I was a bit vague in my description of the features I want to enable here. So let me start making it a bit more clear. I'd like to add support for the following: 1. A "folder:" prefix in the search syntax that will match components of the directory in which mail files are stored. So, if you've got mail filed into directories, (from using a folder-based email program, or from doing an imap sync from gmail that turns tags into directories), then you could search for things like "folder:spam", "folder:important", "folder:arbitrary/subset/of/some/path", etc. 2. A "list:" prefix to match content from headers that identify mailing list. My perception is that there are likely a handful of different headers that have been used, and they should all be indexed so that "list:" will search any of them. 3. Some prefix that can be used to match typical headers added by spam-filtering software, (maybe this would be a general prefix---see below). I think the above are probably the three I can think of that pretty much everybody has asked for, so that should be indexed by default. Beyond that, I'd like to be able to provide support for arbitrary headers in the email. I had envisioned allowing the user to configure specific headers to index. Alternately, I had imagined having a blacklist of "uninteresting" headers and indexing everything else. (Though, now Dirk is very interested in Received and its perhaps provides the most content of any of the headers I originally thought would be "uninteresting".) One experiment I should do is to measure how much my database would grow if I were to index all of the header content. I don't really know what kind of a percentage we're talking about. Finally, we'd need a syntax for searching all of these headers. Rather than trying to map each header name to a custom prefix, I think what might be best would be a general thing that could look like: header:"X-Spam-Flag: YES" We don't currently have the ability to tie a search to the beginning of a line, but it occurs to me that we could do something fancy like index each header with a specific term to indicate line beginnings. Then, with a custom query parser we could use the common symbol of '^' to map to that. That would enable something like: header:"^X-Spam-Flag: YES" That's a lot of work though, (and perhaps not as important as it's probably uncommon for a header name to appear within the value of some other header). > Hmm - haven't even thought about drafts, yet. How would the UI deal with > those? I would imagine another "folder" alongside the others that would list all drafts, and selecting any such message would bring up the message in a mode to edit it. Sup also displayed draft messages in their proper location in the threads containing the message being replied to, (and highlighted such threads in the search view). All of that sounds quite easy to do by simply saving the draft within the mailstore and giving it a "draft" tag. Finally, many mail interfaces prompt from the "compose new message" command whether an existing draft should be continued. That's useful to help the user avoid forgetting to complete and send a draft that was forgotten. -Carl -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://notmuchmail.org/pipermail/notmuch/attachments/20100408/6db35722/attachment.pgp>