On 15 Mar 2019, at 17:05, Chris Newman wrote:
The IMAP standard requires implementation of a pure substring search,
but in practice most search indexing software toolkits only do
word-based search and don't support efficient substring search (most
can do reasonably efficient prefix search but not efficient suffix
search). So particularly for body searches, you need to search for a
substring that counts as a word to whatever indexing software is used
on the IMAP server you're using. Also search for a stop word (e.g.,
'and') may not work either (not indexing those words reduces index
size). The IMAP server I work on can either do IMAP compliant search
brute-force or do word-based indexed body search quickly and it's up
to the server admin to choose which to use. Given that many clients do
body search by default now, most admins of larger sites choose to use
the indexed word-based search.
All true but not really relevant for MailMate users.
MailMate's search is entirely client-side, using a custom index in
~/Library/Application Support/MailMate/Database.noindex/ which is also
what makes the "Smart Folder" feature possible.
While it's possible to implement efficient indexed pure substring
search, that requires a significantly larger search index than
word-based search technologies, and it's not clear "free" email
services would be willing to pay for that extra storage when they can
just ignore the standard and provide word-based search cheaper (and I
don't recall being asked to provide such a feature by any customer).
Also search indexing software is likely to drop any markup. So if the
URL is an HTML link rather than actually in the text of the message,
it may not be indexed (or searchable) at all.
Testing confirms that MM will find arbitrary substrings of URLs which
are in plain text mail or in the content text of HTML mail but will NOT
find any part of URL's that only exist in markup (i.e. href=) values.
--
Bill Cole
[email protected] or [email protected]
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Available For Hire: https://linkedin.com/in/billcole
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