355388 - Imap insists on searching server (online search) when local (offline) copies are available

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Search, defect)

Description

[Michael Maier]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; InfoPath.1)
Build Identifier: versi 3 alpha 1 (20061002)  and the current version 1.5.0.7

I have IMAP set to keep local copies.  It will only search local copies(particularly the body section) when I force Thunderbird offline.  It is much faster offline.  I know that there was one beta version I believe 1.6 that worked fine when online, but I have not seen it since.  I should not have to go offline to get the speed, if all my mail is cached from the IMAP server on the local computer.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.online
2.search body for word
3.serching folder... appears to go on forever
4.stop
5.offline
6.search body
7.almost instant results start showing up and completed shortly after


Expected Results:  
I expect that if you have all your mail downloaded locally from IMAP, that it will allow much quicker searches.

Comment 1

[Michael Maier]

There appears to be  no way to set Thunderbird to search locally cached copies of IMAP mail.  This is still tru in Version 2 beta 1 (20061130).  If you search "Entire Message", the search search will appear to be hung, and will not return any results.  Unlike searching "Subject or Sender", which results in instant results.  From what I have read it will try to do a server side search, which could be resolved with an option to search locally cached copies of IMAP mail.  I have not problem searching for anything, once I go offline.   It finds related e-mails relatively fast.  

Comment 2

[Nikolay Shopik]

Apply to latest trunk version 3.0a1pre (2008042403), we should mark this as RFE. Probably option to turn off/on will even better solution for this.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

seems to me this is a dupe

Comment 4

[Kent James (:rkent)]

I thought that online search was rare, not the default. AFAIK we never do it unless asked to, and in some cases we even ignore requests to search online when it can also be accomplished offline.

It would be interesting to test the main behavior complaint of this bug (that searches go faster when the computer is offline) and see if it is still valid, rather than assume what is the cause. But make sure that the search correctly in both cases. The exact search terms would be important to know.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

offline body search across all folders for "tests" with 339 hits was, for my vseerror account (non-gmail), about 30% faster when done with File | offline | work offline

Nikolay, can you confirm this behavior?

Comment 6

[Kent James (:rkent)]

"Though I have it set to keep copies locally (offline), Imap insists on searching server (online search)"

The question would be, what should you do with online search when a folder is available offline?

My expectation is "honor the user request to search offline".

Options are "ignore user and search locally".

"Reset online search to offline and disable UI for online search"

or something similar. I question the premise of this bug, that we should be searching locally when the user has requested server search.

Comment 7

[Nikolay Shopik]

Wayne, I have pretty much same results with body search in 3000+ email folder takes about 2-3 seconds both locally and on server. There also weirdness regarding non-ascii encoding search, but that's different issue.

Though when you doing server search sometimes status bar doesn't update and keep telling you that it "searching.."