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<p dir="auto">On 25 Jun 2023, at 10:59, Robert M. Münch wrote:</p>
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<p dir="auto">Using a classical database with indexes and the mail information MM recognizes put into columns, should give mostly instant answers.</p>
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<p dir="auto">The validity of this assertion will depend on a lot of factors, including the size and content of the email corpus, along with the capacity of the machine performing the search.</p>
<p dir="auto">I think the key point is that MailMate was not designed, much less optimized, to be a database search engine, because it doesn’t <em>need</em> to be one. Implementing that might easily require more of my machine resources than I am prepared to dedicate to an email client. Instead, it is, first and foremost, an email client that fetches, organizes and displays email efficiently. MailMate’s markup composition system is, frankly, a bit of a quirk, but it’s also an obvious tradeoff to make for a one-man dev team producing an email client. MailMate’s design is focused on what matters the most.</p>
<p dir="auto">The search is fine IMHO, but it is also secondary. It supports infrequent, ad hoc queries with some highly-specialized filters on a wide range of email content, and it just works. The search performance is entirely adequate, especially when the scope of the search can be suitably limited. I rarely feel the need to search my entire email archive because I can almost always narrow down the scope, at least to a particular sub-folder based on the source or the year the message was sent. Those times when I do give up and search across everything, it’s usually so I can find my bearings when browsing older stuff. Then I can narrow down future searches based on the global search results. I admit that’s entirely my personal style, but it works for me.</p>
<p dir="auto">Glenn P. Parker<br>
<a href="mailto:glenn.parker@comcast.net" style="color: #3983C4;">glenn.parker@comcast.net</a></p>
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