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Re: IMAP server side search integration



Hi,

On Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 10:53:09AM -0700, Brendan Cully wrote:
> 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.

Please don't remove full-text regexp searches. Yes, they're very slow
and very inefficient but in some cases they're the only way to find what
you might be looking for. If a user is prepared to wait I think they
should be permitted to.

> 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?

This would be my preference.

How difficult would it be to silently use server-side substring
searching if the user-supplied search pattern doesn't contain any regexp
metacharacters ? In that case, the search modifier above would only be
needed to force the search pattern to be evaluated as a substring.


Regards,
james
-- 
Times flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like bananas.