thank you for make the extension and the backend. I returned back from Evolution to Thunderbird beause of some lacks in ‘Getting Things Done’ with Evolution.

After checking out the code, running autogen.sh well (installaing required libraries)
compilation fails with

./Tiles/MailMessage.cs(142,3): error CS1002: Expecting `;’
Compilation failed: 1 error(s), 0 warnings
make[2]: *** [Search.exe] Fehler 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/beagle-tbird-soc07/search’
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Fehler 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/beagle-tbird-soc07′
make: *** [all] Fehler 2

I dunno how to fix this . Do you have a hint?
And how to enable the backend? I even had a thunderbird backend in beagle. Would it be replaces by ‘make install’?

Thx & bye

While i was writing this comment the extension was nearly done with indexing my mails(>30.000)! I’m curious how it deals with even larger mail archives, but don’t see any real problems here

Andreas

Andreas:
Thanks a lot for you feedback, I really appreciate it

I think there’s been a bit of a misunderstanding here. You should never under any circumstances create the ToIndex directory manually. That is a very bad idea. What you should create however is the ThunderbirdIndex directory within ~/.beagle/Indexes. And what’s the reason for that? Well, let me tell ya. Each backend in beagle has its own index. They are all placed under the mentioned directory, ~/.beagle/Indexes. The index directory used by beagle for the Thunderbird index is simply called ThunderbirdIndex. The Thunderbird extension will check if this directory is available before starting to index. This is simply because: why produce a lot of data for beagle to index in case there’s no backend that will index the files anyway? That’s basically why I’ve implemented it this way. If the ThunderbirdIndex directory exists however, the extension will assume that beagle will index the data (since beagle have an index for it). The ToIndex directory will automatically be created by the extension and Thunderbird is the maintainer of this directory. The ToIndex directory is used by Thunderbird to determine what to index. If the ThunderbirdIndex directory exists but the ToIndex directory does not, Thunderbird will assume that nothing has been indexed by beagle already and that everything will have to be re-indexed. This is quite logical since Thunderbird is responsible of creating this directory and no one else should touch it. So this is a pretty good assumption. If the ToIndex directory exists however, Thunderbird will assume that data has been indexed by beagle and continue indexing data that hasn’t been indexed yet. Everything that has been indexed is marked with a little flag that says so. So Thunderbird can always continue from where it last left off. We also get the nice side-effect that Thunderbird will start all over if we bump index version in beagle (since beagle will remove and create the ThunderbirdIndex directory again thus removing the ToIndex directory as well).

This turned out to be a quite long comment but the moral of this story is: if you don’t have beagle with the Thunderbird backend enabled you won’t get the ThunderbirdIndex directory, thus no indexing. To work around this I’ve told you to create this directory manually so that you at least can test the extension without having the backend available. I hope you at least see where I’m going with this?

Besides those found in build-dep and thunderbird-dev, I found that I also needed to install libnspr4-dev.

I tested the extension and Beagle SVN on Ubuntu Feisty. I wrote a bit of an article on it:

http://clariti.blogspot.com/2007/08/desktop-search-with-thunderbird-and.html

Short conclusion: the stuff basically works. I encountered 2 bugs, the most critical being that it doesn’t find everything it should. Details in the article. I hope you can easily fix them; let me know if you need more info.

Kudos for building this!

Cheers,
Aron

Nice article there. The issue you are mentioning about emails not being opened if Thunderbird is already running is a known issue. But it seems like there’s no one in the community willing to help me fix it. I cannot reproduce it with my set-up so I need someone with this issue to help me. It would be very appreciated by me if we could meet up on for instance GTalk and try to settle this.

The other issue about beagle not being able to find everything is most likely a “daemon” issue. I have the same issue as well but with other backends, so I don’t think it’s Thunderbird specific in this case. Not sure how to fix this.

Yes we could meet up, although I don’t have GTalk, only MSN. E-mail me if you want, this weekend might work.

I think I have found the cause of my “too little matches” problem: it seems the body of the messages isn’t indexed, only author/subject/recipients. If I run my test query in TB searching only the subject, I get exactly the same amount of matches as in Beagle. And in the files in ToIndex I also don’t see the body text. That’s not by design is it?

Cheers,
Aron

I installed 1.2 release of your plugin. Thanks for the work.

Which Beagle release is needed to run you plugin? I’m on Ubuntu 7.04 and Beagle 0.2.16.3, with ThunderbirdIndex folder created, but Beagle doesn’t seem to index anything…

Thanks again.

My guess to why you are seeing the ThunderbirdIndex folder is that you have my old backend running. That’s probably why nothing is indexed.