Fast searching on Dovecot with Fedora

Although dovecot comes with its own full-text indexed search, it doesn’t seem to be enabled by default, at least in Fedora 10.  This is a shame.  For me, it makes a search for body text take a few seconds rather than a couple minutes.

To fix, modify your /etc/dovecot.conf and restart dovecot.

  • Add fts and fts_squat to the mail_plugins line in your protocol section (protocol imap for me).
  • Specifically, look for:

    protocol imap {
    ...
    #mail_plugins =
    ...
    }

    and change it to look more like:

    protocol imap {
    ...
    mail_plugins = fts fts_squat
    ...
    }
  • Add fts = squat to the plugins section.
  • plugins {
    ...
    fts = squat
    ...
    }

Sadly, there was no Ubuntu help forum thread that made all this blindingly obvious, so I hope this post fills that need. This all worked on Fedora 10 with dovecot 1.1.10.

Have a nice day.

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