Full text search indexing
=========================

Dovecot v1.1 supports the following FTS indexers:

 * <Squat> [Plugins.FTS.Squat.txt] is Dovecot's own search index.
 * <Lucene> [Plugins.FTS.Lucene.txt] uses Lucene's C++ library.
 * <Solr> [Plugins.FTS.Solr.txt] communicates with Lucene's Solr server
   [http://lucene.apache.org/solr/]. Use this instead of fts-lucene if
   possible.

The main difference between Squat indexes and the others is that Squat provides
support for substring searches. This is required for IMAP protocol compliancy,
so TEXT and BODY searches are looked up only from Squat indexes. Dovecot's
non-standard X-TEXT-FAST and X-BODY-FAST SEARCH parameters can be used to look
up from non-Squat indexes.

Currently the indexes are updated only while searching, so neither <deliver>
[LDA.txt] nor IMAP APPEND command updates the indexes immediately. This means
that if user has received a lot of mail since the last indexing, it may take a
while to index all the mails before replying to the search command. Dovecot
sends periodic "* OK Indexed n% of the mailbox" updates which can be caught by
webmail implementations to implement a progress bar. You could also build a
cronjob to index users' mailboxes once in a while (by selecting each mailbox
and issuing a 'SEARCH TEXT xyzzyx' command).

Using both Squat and non-Squat
------------------------------

It's possible to use both Squat and non-Squat indexes at the same time, so that
TEXT/BODY are looked up from Squat indexes and X-TEXT-FAST/X-BODY-FAST are
looked up from the non-Squat index. This of course means that indexes will have
to be built and updated for both, so it might not be that good idea.

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
protocol imap {
..
  mail_plugins = fts fts_squat fts_solr
}
...
plugin {
  fts = squat solr
}
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

(This file was created from the wiki on 2009-10-16 04:42)