Gloda indexing

This page provides a big-picture summary of what the indexer does; please see the source for nitty-gritty details or if this page seems to be wrong.  GlodaIndexer provides the core indexing logic. GlodaMsgIndexer has the message-specific stuff, although the actual attribute-providers are found in GlodaExplicitAttr and GlodaFundAttr. GlodaABIndexer has the limited address book support.

What Folders get Indexed?

• Never Indexed
  • per priority policy:
    • Trash folders
    • Junk folders
    • Queue folders (outbox?)
    • Newsgroup folders
  • per hard-coded do-not-go-in-there logic:
    • non-Mail folders (we do a bitmask test on the folder flags)
    • Virtual folders (we do a bitmask test on the folder flags)
    • folders which are neither local nor IMAP (we do an instanceof test to make sure the implementations are either local folders or IMAP folders)
• Indexed with priority, where bigger numbers are indexed before lower numbers:
  • 60:
    • Sent mail
  • 50:
    • Inboxes
  • 40
    • Favorite folders -- You can right click on folders and mark them as your favorite.  Note that currently gloda does not listen for this attribute changing on a folder so this is likely to be inconsistently applied.
  • 30
    • CheckNew -- This might come from a secret pref or something.  Just like favorite folders, this is likely to be stale.
  • 20
    • Default; everybody else.

What Messages get Indexed?

All local (POP) messages get indexed.  IMAP messages get indexed according to the following rules provided in table form:

What Parts of Messages get Full-text Indexed?

• Always
  • The message author's display name and e-mail address *as present in the e-mail message*.  We do not involve any nickname you've applied to the contact.
  • The message recipients' display name and e-mail addresses *as present in the e-mail message*.
  • The message subject line.
• Only if the message body was available:
  • The body text.  If the message had an HTML part without a corresponding text part, we convert the HTML part to text.
  • The attachment names.

The impact of the latter point is that a gloda full-text search will still work even when messages are not available offline, but obviously the quality of the search will be greatly reduced.