Yesterday I started looking into adding server-side search for IMAP mailboxes. It looks like it shouldn't be hard to augment mutt's normal pattern language with server-side help for the full body patterns (~b, ~h and ~H), except for one little wrinkle: IMAP search doesn't support regular expressions, only substring matches. So I'd like to solicit opinions on how best to integrate server-side search into the mutt pattern language. Some possibilities: 1. Silently treat the arguments to ~(b|h|H) as simple strings and pass them to the server. You'd lose the ability to do full-text regular expression searches on IMAP folders. On the other hand, client-side searches are currently painful enough that probably no one does them anyway. 2. Three more pattern commands. Since there aren't many letters left, these would end up being pretty obscure, and normal body searches would still have to fetch every message. I don't really like this option. 3. A modifier for ~b..., eg $~b or $~h, indicating that the parameters are substrings rather than regular expressions. Would people actually remember to use it or is it just a nuisance? I'm probably leaning towards 1 at the moment... One other point is that IMAP's header search command takes two arguments (header and field substring). I suppose this could be hacked around by just splitting the argument on the first colon though... -b
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