Re: Conversation View

[Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com>]

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 20, 2010, at 10:01 AM, Erik Hetzner <ehetzner@gmail.com> wrote:

> At Fri, 13 Aug 2010 21:46:57 -0800,
> David Abrahams wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> I just wrote an article about recent discoveries in my neverending
>> quest to read my mail in the context of the entire thread:
>> http://techarcana.net/2010/08/13/gmail-conversation-view-in-wanderlust/
>> If anyone here has related feedback, hints, or implementation ideas,
>> I'd really appreciate hearing them.
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I am on a similar move *away* from gmail, so I wanted to look into
> this feature using dovecot alone. Here is some information about what
> I found.
> 
> dovecot apparently has a (new?) feature called “virtual folders” which
> allows one to replicate the “All mail” folder from Gmail, and
> more. See:
> 
>  http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Virtual
> 
> (Virtual folders also allow you to create virtual folders that
> simulate gmail conversation view. See the above wiki.)

Yeah; tried it but it didn't work for me. In fact it was kind of awful. See this thread for the full report: http://www.mail-archive.com/dovecot@dovecot.org/msg24923.html

My guess is that this feature hasnt had much testing


> For search, dovecot also has two full-text search engines, squat and a
> solr interface. solr seems to perform better, at the expense of full
> IMAP spec compliance. squat works pretty well too. I was able to
> perform a filter search (using both backends) for Message-ID or
> References. The search was fast, especially with Solr, once dovecot
> had generated all the indexes. (dovecot generates indexes on the fly;
> it can be slow if it has been a while since you searched).

I never tried switching the search backend, but with a large message history searching was anything but fast. 


> I think, at this point, that dovecot can largely duplicate gmail
> features (fast search, an all mail folder, conversation view). It
> would be great if WL could be modified to pull in all referenced
> messages from an “all mail” folder so that one could see the complete
> thread, not simply messages in the thread that are in the current
> mailbox.

I think I may be on the trail of developing that feature. Coul really use some  help tho