Bug 171858

Summary: "Complete Message" is a poor default choice for "Find Messages"
Product: [Unmaintained] kmail Reporter: Mark Martinec <Mark.Martinec>
Component: searchAssignee: kdepim bugs <kdepim-bugs>
Status: RESOLVED WAITINGFORINFO    
Severity: wishlist CC: bjoern, luigi.toscano
Priority: NOR    
Version: unspecified   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: FreeBSD Ports   
OS: All   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Mark Martinec 2008-09-29 16:56:30 UTC 
Version:           1.9.9, 1.10.1 (using KDE 4.1.1)
OS:                FreeBSD
Installed from:    FreeBSD Ports

A default choice (top of the list) for "Find Messages" used to be a search by "Subject", which has been changed to search by "Complete Message" starting with mail 1.9.9.

The new default is a very unfortunate choice for IMAP users with more that just a few messages in their IMAP folder. IMAP searches by indexed fields such as Subject, From, To, Size are very quick, while searches across entire message contents can be quite slow, from dozens of seconds to several minutes on folders with lots of messages.

This means that now for every search I need to perform additional operations to select a "Subject" from a list of choices, and hope that I do not forget to do so.

Forgetting to do so on a large folder now bears a heavy penalty for the user: either one has to wait minutes for a search to complete, or forcibly terminate entire kmail application and restart it in order to open a new IMAP session.

It does not suffice to STOP a search, as the IMAP server remains tied up in searching and is unresponsive to new requests until the search completes. The only choice is to terminate kmail so that existing IMAP session is dropped.

Replacing a default search by subject (quick and usually sufficient) by a search on complete message was a poor decision from usability viewpoint. I urge you to make it configurable or to revert to a previous default.
Comment 1 Myriam Schweingruber 2012-08-18 08:55:06 UTC 
Thank you for your feature request. Kmail1 is currently unmaintained so we are closing all wishes. Please feel free to reopen a feature request for Kmail2 if it has not already been implemented.
Thank you for your understanding.
Comment 2 Luigi Toscano 2012-08-18 23:51:19 UTC 
Instead of creating a new feature request, please confirm here if the wishlist is still valid for kmail2
Comment 3 Mark Martinec 2012-08-20 12:51:47 UTC 
> Instead of creating a new feature request, please confirm here if the
> wishlist is still valid for kmail2

I tried switching to kmail2 a couple of weeks ago, but it was unusable
for me (under FreeBSD 9.0, all from ports) due to akonadi trouble
with a database (looks like https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/27520 ),
so I had to revert to kmail1,  now I'm running  kmail 1.13.7, kde 4.8.4.

Will report back when/if I gather enough will to try switching to kmail2 again.
Keeping the status RESOLVED for now is alright with me, although
I'd expect the issue is still there.