On 16 Jun 2023, at 17:17, Bill Cole wrote:
> MM uses an indexing mechanism that appears to be custom-designed for the
> specific purpose of searching email. You can see the artifacts of that in
> ~/Library/Application Support/MailMate/Database.noindex/.
That looks much like a file-based approach to store data, which wouldn't scale
if things are read on-demand and need to be parsed.
> Only Benny could conceivably explain the details,
Sure.
> but it seems to me to be unlikely that he would get much from ripping all
> that out and replacing it with SQLite or some other off-the-shelf tool.
Using a classical database with indexes and the mail information MM recognizes
put into columns, should give mostly instant answers.
> One serious issue with indexing email is that email is highly divergent in
> data structure, and while you can do a simple index for basic standard mail
> metadata, "full text" and "all headers" search for mail is a nightmare
> because real-world mail breaks almost every rule theoretically governing it
> and it is not a simple matter to determine what is or is not body text. Email
> typically arrives with multiple alternative parts theoretically representing
> the same message, possibly QP or B64 encoded and usually including one
> version with HTML markup. And that markup can be bad, wrong, or even
> intentionally malicious.
Well, MM already handles all this, otherwise we couldn't use it as we do. Those
parts are will known to MM.
> Very large mail stores are inherently tough to search.
After pre-processing all the mail mess, I don't think so. Searching in Gmail is
fast. MM is already much better than other clients.
IMO the use-case search *1+ million emails as fast as possible* is just not in
scope for most of the clients.
--
Robert M. Münch
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