518584 - Gloda global search: Need a way of specifying which folders (not) to index for searching (include, exclude folders)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 545469

(Thunderbird :: Search, enhancement)

Description

[Allan Beaufour]

I love the new search function in tb3.0b4, but it indexes all my mail folders, which handicaps the functionality a bit for me. Because I'm really not interested in searching through my spam folders for example... How about adding a flag in the folder settings for enabling/disabling indexing of a folder?

Comment 1

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Bug 484639 is for not indexing junk messages - would that be sufficient or do you need greater control for some reason?

Note that you are still able to do the old search per folder or advanced search for particular sub folders.

Comment 2

[Allan Beaufour]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Bug 484639 is for not indexing junk messages - would that be sufficient or do
> you need greater control for some reason?

I do not use the spamfilter/junk functionality in tb, but have spamassassin running on my mail server. In that setup I have a few spamfolders, for different levels of spam -- which I check occasionally for false positives. There's 0 need for me to have those indexed.

I also have some folders for random server-generated messages, which I do not have any interest in ever getting indexed

> Note that you are still able to do the old search per folder or advanced search
> for particular sub folders.

Yep.

Comment 4

[Edward Rudd]

(from dupped bug)  My need is to not index the spam folder indexing (minor need) but more important is prevent the indexing of a "bcc" account which has copies of all notifications sent out from our ticket notification system. (around 100K per month and it retains the past 90days).    I only ever search that as a "per folder" search and rely on IMAP to do my searching (it's indexed on the server)

Other than the ability to exclude folders (my co-worker has the same request) the global search is AWESOME.  I can find messages SO much easier now.

Comment 6

[Sander Lepik]

I'm having problems with Gmail's All mail folder + some other lists folders i have no interests to index.

Comment 7

[Ludovic LANGE]

I second this also.

My use case is the same as Comment #3 : I have a lot of mails that are auto-generated and that I don't want to be indexed.
They are stored in specific folders, so a "do not index" property of that folder would be very welcome.

Comment 8

[Jake Goulding]

Agree - I have an entire account that is basically a vestigial account. I would love to disable indexing for that entire account. Even in my main account, I would like to ignore mailing lists that I check infrequently, or shared directories that get a lot of automated email.

So, I guess I would request an account-wide "Enable indexing" option, as well as a per-directory "Enable indexing" option.

Comment 9

[Hungerburg]

How about that: Make indexing behave like subscribing to imap folders.

Imap subscriptions have their own quirks (eg. I do not want my users to automatically subscribe to new folders), but they provide a tested model, with a fairly intuitive interface.

Comment 10

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

For the time being, rkent's glodaquilla extension provides a way to stop gloda from indexing folders:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/9873
http://mesquilla.com/extensions/glodaquilla/

The mechanism it uses allows for hierarchical inheritance of settings.  Check out rkent's blog post on the mechanics and interface here:
http://mesquilla.com/2009/11/06/inherited-folder-properties-revisited/

Given the importance of the feature, we will likely try and expose such functionality via the UI in the next minor release of Thunderbird.  It would be interesting to hear whether glodaquilla's interface to do this is sufficiently intuitive.

Comment 11

[Hungerburg]

Here Thunderbird complains that Glodaquilla (0.3) is not compatible with 3.0b4. The screenshots look good. A dialog like the imap subscriptions one, a single window to check/uncheck the flag for all the accounts and folders would be nice. Still, I can also think of a way to tame gloda with *few* mouseclicks and the UI provided in the extension.

Comment 12

[Kent James (:rkent)]

GlodaQuilla version 0.3 incorporates post-beta4 changes that asuth did precisely to the areas that affect whether a message is indexed or not. So it supports RC1 and later TB 3.0 versions.

Comment 13

[Allan Beaufour]

(In reply to comment #10)
> For the time being, rkent's glodaquilla extension provides a way to stop gloda
> from indexing folders:
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/9873
> http://mesquilla.com/extensions/glodaquilla/
> 
> The mechanism it uses allows for hierarchical inheritance of settings.  Check
> out rkent's blog post on the mechanics and interface here:
> http://mesquilla.com/2009/11/06/inherited-folder-properties-revisited/
> 
> Given the importance of the feature, we will likely try and expose such
> functionality via the UI in the next minor release of Thunderbird.  It would be
> interesting to hear whether glodaquilla's interface to do this is sufficiently
> intuitive.

I have no need for hierarchical settings, but the enable/disable button suits my needs. Issue is, gloda has already indexed all my folders. How do I get rid of those from my cache?

Comment 14

[Kent James (:rkent)]

(In reply to comment #13)
> 
> I have no need for hierarchical settings, but the enable/disable button suits
> my needs. Issue is, gloda has already indexed all my folders. How do I get rid
> of those from my cache?

Unfortunately that still needs to be added to GlodaQuilla. asuth and I have discussed how to do it, but I have not gotten to it yet. It is not difficult, but I am working with some of my other extensions at the moment. I should have that feature available for TB 3.0 final though.

Right now the workaround (ugly I know) is to delete your gloda index file, and let it reindex.

Comment 16

[[e-mail]]

One additional use case I'll add here is mailing lists. I have a number of them that I subscribe to, and I don't want them indexed, since they're high traffic, and I only occasionally pay attention to them.

Another thought along these lines is to allow a filter to mark a message as "Don't index." Thus, people could flag messages per the advanced filtering they allow, and they wouldn't have to keep certain messages in or out of certain folders.

Comment 17

[Mark Nienberg]

Here is another case for consideration.  In a business setting we have a "public" imap namespace that is shared among all users.  This allows users to move project-related messages into specific project folders in the public namespace for sharing with everyone. The problem is that the public namespace contains many thousands of messages and if every user indexes them it will take forever to create the indexes and the index files will be gigantic and the imap server will be stressed. Until we are able to turn off indexing for the public folder we have had to turn off indexing altogether.

Comment 19

[Adrian Popa]

I have installed glodaquilla and it provides a checkbox for each folder which activates (or deactivates) indexing. It should solve my indexing problems of all alarms/mailing list folders. However this should be available in the default thunderbird interface.

I will monitor the progress but so far it still eats up my processor with indexing tasks...

Comment 20

[Luigi Rosa]

(In reply to comment #19)

> I have installed glodaquilla and it provides a checkbox for each folder which
> activates (or deactivates) indexing. It should solve my indexing problems of
> all alarms/mailing list folders. However this should be available in the
> default thunderbird interface.

Thank you for the suggestion! I have just installed glodaquilla and disabled the indexing in the same kind of directories.

Comment 21

[Peter Nemsak]

Exact problem as Phil's, Ludovic's and probably a lot of others. Notification mails, stats, and stuff. Hundreds of mails weekly, thousands monthly.

I'd be really happy if a "disable indexing" checkbox tree (it might as well be inside the account subscription tree as the next checkbox column, this way you'd clearly see, which folders are subscribed and indexed) was in one of the next versions.

Comment 22

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

The original request (same as confirmed by most of the comments), namely to have a per-folder checkbox to toggle gloda indexing, has been fixed somewhere along the way: In current release version TB 7, right-click on folder > properties > Include messages in this folder in global search results.

Any further requests for UI improvements pls file a new bug if required.

Michael Lissner, you may wish to file a new bug if required for your comment 16 (implement message filter action to "don't index this message"), though that idea is certainly less easy to do than it sounds.