[MlMt] Searching for text of URL links

[Randall Gellens]

On 15 Mar 2019, at 14:05, Chris Newman wrote:

> The IMAP standard requires implementation of a pure substring search, 
> but in practice most search indexing software toolkits only do 
> word-based search and don't support efficient substring search (most 
> can do reasonably efficient prefix search but not efficient suffix 
> search). So particularly for body searches, you need to search for a 
> substring that counts as a word to whatever indexing software is used 
> on the IMAP server you're using. Also search for a stop word (e.g., 
> 'and') may not work either (not indexing those words reduces index 
> size). The IMAP server I work on can either do IMAP compliant search 
> brute-force or do word-based indexed body search quickly and it's up 
> to the server admin to choose which to use. Given that many clients do 
> body search by default now, most admins of larger sites choose to use 
> the indexed word-based search.
>
> While it's possible to implement efficient indexed pure substring 
> search, that requires a significantly larger search index than 
> word-based search technologies, and it's not clear "free" email 
> services would be willing to pay for that extra storage when they can 
> just ignore the standard and provide word-based search cheaper (and I 
> don't recall being asked to provide such a feature by any customer).
>
> Also search indexing software is likely to drop any markup. So if the 
> URL is an HTML link rather than actually in the text of the message, 
> it may not be indexed (or searchable) at all.


All good points.  Note that MailMate indexes the local store (which I 
believe contains everything in all subscribed or accessed mailboxes), so 
in this case it's likely that the search was done by MailMate itself 
rather than the server.  Probably whatever MailMate uses for indexing is 
word-based.

I've often had difficulty finding messages using the search bar, but 
doing an Edit -> Find -> Mailbox Search has worked for me when the 
search bar has failed, which I chalk up to not fully understanding what 
how the search bar works.

--Randall



> On 15 Mar 2019, at 10:33, Ted Lesley wrote:
>
>> I must be missing something, I’m trying to search for the text of 
>> links in mail messages and they don’t come up when I search for 
>> part of the URL (domain, string in link, etc.)
>>
>> What am I missing? Thanks for any help.
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