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A comment on Gmail’s fake loading indicator (2020). Parent comment

Re:Gmail’s fake loading indicator (2020) by winrid on Thursday November 11, 2021 @02:50AM (#29185504)
The reason search is slow on your computer is just that the app doesn't use the right kind of index, or maybe no index, for whatever reason. I can index hundreds of gigabytes of text on my laptop and have full text search take a couple milliseconds.

The problem is mail servers. They usually don't support search this way, so the client has to download or cache each message to do the search. Gmail gets around this by having their own protocol and the indexes ready.

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Re:Gmail’s fake loading indicator (2020) by zinconfire on Thursday November 11, 2021 @03:07AM (#29185613)
IMAP does support server-side full-text search of bodies. (In mutt, this is invoked with the =b operator of the l command.) Amusingly enough, this works well with real mail servers like dovecot, but it seems to sometimes miss matches with gmail, because gmail's indexes aren't very good.
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Re:Gmail’s fake loading indicator (2020) by winrid on Thursday November 11, 2021 @11:27AM (#29189777)
The more you know, thanks!
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