How best to get Full-text search in Dovecot about docker-mailserver

[jeboehm]

Thanks for your great work. This is now released in v3.4.0

[kklepper]

Well, it is quite some time I had a look at this, but as far as I remember emails are stored as plain text files.

We have mysql for user management, why not store emails in mysql and then use sphinx-search (http://sphinxsearch.com/)?

The mail solution as it is is enough for me, so I would not have a look at it, but I use sphinx in other settings and it is stunning, as is well known.

[agittins]

Thanks for your thoughts.

Rather than re-invent the wheel, I was simply looking for how best to tie one of the existing dovecot fulltext-search solutions into the docker-mailserver setup.

I wasn't aware of sphinxsearch so thanks for bringing it to my attention! :-) But for this particular job, I'm really just interested in integrating one of the existing solutions rather than implementing something new altogether (and I wouldn't be keen on pumping tens of GB of emails into mysql just for searching!) - it does support flat textfiles, too - but again, it's not one of the well-tested existing FTS solutions for Dovecot, so would be a project over on dovecot rather than here.

Does everyone who cares about fast searching just give up on self-hosting and use gmail? I'm surprised there doesn't seem to be a well-trodden path here :-/

[agittins]

So just one month later someone posted a handy blog post showing how they set up the xapian fts plugin (which is "community developed" rather than part of dovecot core).

I see Alpine has packages for it, too: https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=dovecot-fts-xapian*&branch=edge

If I can get some time I'll take a look at

So there's a PR on it's way! :-)

[agittins]

Fantastic! Glad to see this merged :-D