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I’ve never been able to search my entire mail archive quickly over IMAP, using Gmail or Fastmail. Mobile IMAP clients seem especially slow and inconsistent.
by sjy 6y ago
I’ve never been able to search my entire mail archive quickly over IMAP, using Gmail or Fastmail. Mobile IMAP clients seem especially slow and inconsistent.
- saurik 6y agoIMAP exposes a pretty comprehensive server-side query system. If your email is being synced locally then you aren't dealing with an IMAP limitation, as it isn't even using IMAP. If it is searching remotely, wither the email isn't being indexed for those searches or the client is doing some ridiculously poor search strategy. Like, if you actually look at the mechanism IMPA exposes for this, it is pretty powerful. (The only real limitation is that the original SEARCH mechanism is per-"mailbox", but this was fixed a long time ago with the SEARCHM extension. But arguably the correct way to map Gmail to IMAP is to put all your email in one "mailbox" and use IMAP "flags" as labels anyway.)
- sjy 6y agoSo I’m told, and yet searching my mail from the iOS mail app over IMAP is slow and unreliable, so I use the Fastmail app, even though it is slower to launch. Have you found a mobile IMAP client that works? notmuch [1] looks like it would solve my problems on the desktop, but searching from mobile devices is important to me. [1] https://notmuchmail.org https://notmuchmail.org
- folmar 6y agoServer-side search on K9 works fine, but you have to select that you want it.