What to do about SEARCH?

Greetings,

The spec has had an unspecified SEARCH command for a while now.  I'd like to
either fill this out, or remove the command.  I don't know which to do.

SEARCH would be very useful for clients -- they could search for messages
matching (unknown) criteria in a given mail folder without having to download
all the messages, which is kind of the point of a remote mail access protocol.

However, to do any kind of meaningful content search, the server almost
certainly has to parse and un-MIME-ify a message, because otherwise any
content transfer encoding other than 7bit or 8bit would cause false negatives
or false positives.  This is really ugly.

An alternative would be to only search the message header.  Is that even
useful?

Then, if search is necessary, what form does it take?  Simple substring
matches?  Full-blown pcre?  Somewhere in between?

Lots of questions.  Few answers.

Thoughts?

Charles
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Charles Cazabon                           <[email protected]>
BikINI project website:    http://www.qcc.ca/~charlesc/software/bikini/
GPL'ed software available at:     http://www.qcc.ca/~charlesc/software/
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