378883 - cannot search tags on imap when server does not store keywords

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Search, defect)

Description

[Aaron Gresch]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3
Build Identifier: 2.0.0.0 (20070326)

If I search on any tag (with emails tagged with this tag), it gives no results.  If I search for emails without a given tag, all emails show.  If I save a tag search, the search results work properly.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

are you searching against an imap server?

Comment 2

[Aaron Gresch]

Yes

Comment 3

[David :Bienvenu]

Your IMAP server probably doesn't support storing keywords on the server, and we're not smart enough to do the search locally in that case...

This is probably a dup of an existing bug, but taking for now.

Comment 5

[Mike]

As I understand it, one problem was that you can now create more tags than some IMAP servers can store.

May I suggest that TB only support assigning the default tags for such servers? It makes no sense (and looks bad) to drop a working feature for another that's subtlety but importantly broken.

Comment 6

[Victor Engmark]

Duplicate of bug 364570?

Comment 7

[David :Bienvenu]

yes, but this bug is clearer, so I'm going to mark the user as a dup.

Other kinds of searches and sorts (quick searches, views, etc) work even on such servers, so removing the tag feature completely for those servers would be extreme.

Comment 8

[David :Bienvenu]

sorry, mark the "other" as dup.

Comment 11

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I'm pretty sure there are more bugs like this but I'm drawing a blank just now.
getting it out of General, if there's a better place than backend please make the change.

Comment 12

[David :Bienvenu]

Search is a better component, I believe, because the fix could involve being able to do searches both locally and on the server - e.g., for a search that has both a body term and tag term, with a server that doesn't support tags on the server, we might want to do the body search on the server, and then combine those results with a local search on the tag terms. Search doesn't know how to do this, currently. Or, we'd just punt and do the search locally, if the folder is configured for offline use...

Comment 13

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #12)
> we might want to do the body search on the server, and then combine
> those results with a local search on the tag terms. Search doesn't know how to
> do this, currently.

yeah, making this just work, and the user not having to care (or be impacted by) how the data is stored would be good.

Comment 14

[Kent James (:rkent)]

There are many operators that don't appear in online search, and to make them appear we really need to give the user the option to select offline search.  They can do that when they save the search, but they can't currently do that in the original search.  If we give them the option to select online or offline search, then this problem with tags would also be solvable as well - though this does not solve Wayne's "just make this work" criteria.