Kmail search­es slow­ly.

I have been a kmail us­er for a cou­ple of years, since I set­tled in my own home of­fice with my own com­put­er.

I like the thing.

How­ev­er, it an­noys me that it takes sooooo long to find a mes­sage in my mail­store. Hey, it's on­ly 13000 mes­sages!

So, while I wait for KDE4 to bring all its search­ing good­ness, I de­cid­ed to see if I could hack some­thing quick­ly.

En­ter mair­ix: a mail in­dex­er/search thing.

Con­vinc­ing mair­ix to in­dex all my mail was rather sim­ple (here is my ~/.­mair­ixr­c):

base=/home/ralsina/
maildir=Mail/*...
maildir=.kde/share/apps/kmail/dimap...
omit=Mail/mairix
database=~/.mairix_db

What does it do?

• It in­­dex­es mail stored at ~/­­Mail and ev­ery­where in my kmail imap fold­er­s.

• It stores search re­­sults in ~/­­Mail/­­mair­ix and ig­nores its con­­tents when search­ing. The re­­sults are stored as links, so they waste no disk space.

Af­ter run­ning mair­ix so it builds its DB (took about a min­ute, which is less than most kmail search­es) , you can search for things like this:

[ralsina@monty ~]$ time mairix b:bartleblog
Matched 6 messages

real    0m0.232s
user    0m0.012s
sys     0m0.204s

And the re­sult can be seen in kmail, in the mair­ix fold­er:

How­ev­er, there is a prob­lem. It will work for the first search, but not for the sec­ond one. On the sec­ond search, you get the same con­tent list­ing, but all mes­sages ap­pear emp­ty.

That's be­cause kmail saves an in­dex file of each fold­er. To work around that, I wrote a lit­tle shell wrap­per, kmair­ix:

#!/bin/sh
rm ~/Mail/.mairix* -f
mairix $*

And you use that in­stead of call­ing mair­ix di­rect­ly.

But there are still im­prove­ments to be done. If your kmail is cur­rent­ly dis­play­ing the mair­ix fold­er, search­ing does­n't up­date the mes­sage list.

DCOP to the res­cue! We can switch to the in­box, then back to mair­ix (ad­just as need­ed for your­self):

dcop kmail KMailIface selectFolder /Local/inbox
dcop kmail KMailIface selectFolder /Local/mairix

Miss­ing pieces:

• How about switch­ing to the kmail win­­dow? Sad­­ly, the kwin DCOP in­­ter­­face seems in­­­com­­plete. Maybe as­sign­ing kmail a hotkey and work from there? Let me know if you have any ideas.

  UP­­­DATE as sug­­gest­ed by An­no He­im­burg: just call kmail.

• A GUI (of course!) prob­a­bly with a tray icon...

• A way to au­­to-up­­date the Mair­ix DB when new mail ar­rives. I am think­ing about do­ing it with in­­cron but have not done it yet.

So, here is the fi­nal ver­sion, put it some­where in your path, and use AL­T+F2 to search your mails :-)

#!/bin/sh
rm ~/Mail/.mairix* -f
mairix $*
dcop kmail KMailIface selectFolder /Local/inbox
dcop kmail KMailIface selectFolder /Local/mairix
kmail