Re: Devin's effort

Tanstaafl:

> On 4/22/2015 11:25 AM, Tanstaafl <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On 4/21/2015 10:20 PM, Bernie Maier <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> So Thunderbird *does* attempt to index something from the entire
> >> mail hierarchy. And I don't want it to do that.
>
> > Actually, I'll go ask and confirm precisely how this (TB Indexing) works
> > in both cases. I *think* it does some indexing of the headers and
> > whatever is available, only because I know I can search a huge mailstore
> > that is not sync'd offline in just a few seconds. I'll report back if I
> > can get a definitive answer...
>
> According to someone who should know (but I've asked if there is any
> official documentation that fully explains indexing/Gloda), Gloda does
> still index as much as it can even if full copies of the emails aren;t
> there.
>
> In my opinion this is a good thing. Indexes simply speed things up.

I'll agree that in many (most?) cases indexes are a good thing. But I'm a 
software developer and so (a) want more control than general users and (b) 
would argue that in some cases indexing of as much as it can is a premature 
optimisation. Also, there are reasons I may prefer to not have each of my 
client installations trawl through my entire server hierarchy. But these 
points are moot because you have identified an addon that can provide extra 
control.

> Ok, so, apparently when Gloda is disabled, there is no indexing going
> on, but as I said, searching on the headers meta-data, the results are
> still really fast even on large mailboxes...

Possibly because IMAP servers can index server-side, and thus having the 
client delegate the search to the server could conceivably be more efficient 
than a client-side search.

I'm not trying to be deliberately argumentative here, BTW. Just pointing out 
that one size does not fit all. And I'll acknowledge that we probably are 
veering quite off-topic now. I just have a kind of professional interest in 
the technicalities, so I'm finding this conversation interesting. For the sake 
of everyone else, though, I'll try and stop now. ;-)

Cheers,

    Bernie