Virtual "all mails" folder in Dovecot to improve search

[necrevistonnezr]

Based on the feedback I received to a request for Snappymail (https://github.com/the-djmaze/snappymail/issues/196) :

The virtual folder must be configured in Dovecot and not through SnappyMail.
The other is implemented and hopefully works when mailserver supports it.

There is no other option as searching in multiple folders through php requires many calls to imap server and then results must be combined.
Maybe in a future version with caching it might be done.

I suggest adding the Virtual Folder plugin to Dovecot (https://doc.dovecot.org/configuration_manual/virtual_plugin/)

This way, it seems to be possible to add a virtual "all mail" folder that allows (web) mail clients to search all mail at once as several don't seem to have implemented a account-wide search for mails.

[girish]

Thanks for bringing this up, since I am interested in this as well. Annoys me to great extent that K-9 search does not work despite us adding solr support.

Last I checked, I thought this was a client side limitation. They had to implement IMAP4 Multimailbox SEARCH Extension. But reading further, it seems dovecot doesn't support this.

I found this really cool page saying which imap server supports what - https://www.imapwiki.org/Specs

[girish]

This whole thread is an interesting read - https://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/2020-May/118823.html

[girish]

For roundcube, we have a patch going at https://github.com/roundcube/roundcubemail/pull/9077 to make search all folders the default.

[girish]

I went down the search rabbit hole on this one. Here's the blog post if you are interested - https://blog.cloudron.io/email-search-in-mail-clients/ .

This will be part of 7.5.1

[necrevistonnezr]

It’s not a bug report per se, more an FYI: The virtual all mail folder throws off iOS / iPadOS Mails folder suggestions when moving or coping emails: Now, it always suggests to move to the “all mails” folder because it sees this folder as the one where the user has previously moved all its emails to, apparently.