on 07/03/2004 04:11 PM, Allen Watson at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> On or near 7/3/04 2:36 PM, Scott Haneda at [EMAIL PROTECTED] observed:
> 
>> I
>> sure wish e-Rage could be a little better in search.
>> 
>> With tiger and the new filesystem they are putting in place, you can search
>> and find emails by various meta data.  I am wondering if this will work with
>> E-rage, I suspect not since the emails are in a singe database.  Are there
>> any plans to make e-rage work with the new search in Tiger?
> 

> I find that Entourage 2004's searching is much faster than it was in
> Entourage X. Would you agree?

Yes, fully agree, it is indeed faster, it is still slow by comparison to my
minimal tests to a few other email apps that do not use a lump file
database.

> (Even if you still characterize it as too slow
> for you.) Search on certain fields seems almost instant, for me,
> particularly on the subject field (simple search with Cmd-F). Searching on
> the body of messages is a lot slower. I keep my mail database trim,
> currently just 2262 messages, so that speeds searching a lot. I archive
> messages I need to keep after 2 weeks in a FileMaker Pro database, and FMP's
> search is nearly instant on a database of 41000 messages, even searching
> full text and'ed and or'ed with other fields. Much more flexible searching,
> too.

I think you hit the nail on the head :-)  I do a lot of body searches, I can
remember (barely) some unique string I mentioned in a email, the subject is
something my brain just can not remember :-)  So it is a body search I must
do.  While I am happy there are options to migrate emails to a external
source, such as filenamker, I personally am not willing to take that step.
To me, it just seems strange, don't get me wrong here, this may sound
harsher than what I mean, but I look at it this way:  We have data in a
database, in this case it is E-rages databases, it does a good job at
storing data, but not so good a job at searching that data.  As a fix, lets
keep a duplicate of the data, one in E-rage and one in some other database.
I have never worked on a project myself where when we ran into performance
issues we hooked on another data source to fix it, we always find a new data
source and *move* to that.  I have looked at a lot of email clients, none of
which I would use, as the features in E-rage are string enough in every
other aspect that I don't care to move.  I can say, Eudora, mail.app, and
the barebones one all perform search very well, Eudora has regex, which is
really nice.  All use a index to do this searching.  I would not object at
all to E-rage having a index, hard drive space is cheap.

> Given the way Unicode text is stored in the database, I don't think you will
> see major speed bumps in searching. It would require an index to do that,
> and that would probably double the size of the already (in the opinion of
> many) too-large database. Incidentally...Tiger's Spotlight searching will do
> just that; store large indices on your hard drive.

Well, store the index separate, I would happily dedicate 2x my DB size to a
index.  Perhaps as a workaround, a simply drag and drop of the E-rage folder
to the hard drive would allow OS X to index it, not sure yet, I guess we
will have to wait and see :-)

Thanks for your comments.

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------
Scott Haneda                                Tel: 415.898.2602
http://www.newgeo.com                       Fax: 313.557.5052
[EMAIL PROTECTED]                            Novato, CA U.S.A.


-- 
To unsubscribe:                     
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
archives:       
<http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.letterrip.com/>
old-archive:       
<http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>

Reply via email to