Question Dovecot & Full Text Search (lucene and/or solr)

[Alban Staehli]

Server operating system version

CentOs 7.9

Plesk version and microupdate number

Plesk Obsidian 18.0.45 Update #2

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone has ever tried enabling full text search for plesk-dovecot (2.3.18-2)?

It shall be enabled by default to my view, as per this suggestion:

Dovecot shipped with Plesk should support Full Text Search

Dovecot shipped with Plesk should support Full Text Search. It is critical in case of large mailboxes ~1Tb

plesk.uservoice.com

I've seen 2 how-to's looking interesting, but not sure it'll work with plesk-dovecot...

1. Lucene: seems simple, only 1 plugin (but seems outdated / not supported anymore): Adding Full Text Search (FTS) to Dovecot on Ubuntu 20.04 – Übermotive
2. Solr: heavy, with a couple of dependencies: Plesk, Dovecot and fast mailbox search with Solr

Any thoughts or success in enabling this (basic) feature?

Thx

 

[imrelaszlo84]

It should be an essential component for Plesk. Plesk Team, please compile your Dovecot with --with-solr option, so expert administrators can setup the full text search. My plan is use this preconfigured Docker package for SOLR:

mailcow-dockerized/data/Dockerfiles/solr at master · mailcow/mailcow-dockerized

mailcow: dockerized - + = . Contribute to mailcow/mailcow-dockerized development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Docker

 

[Peter Debik]

We previously had two Uservoice requests, but each did not hardly get any get votes beyond the person who requested it for a very long while, so these have been declined as there does not seem broader support for that feature among users.

 

[imrelaszlo84]

We previously had two Uservoice requests, but each did not hardly get any get votes beyond the person who requested it for a very long while, so these have been declined as there does not seem broader support for that feature among users.

Indeed, maybe not many people would use it, it is quite an expert area. In the case of company e-mail accounts, e-mail accounts of more than 10 GB with more than 10,000 messages are not uncommon. The search engine of webmail interfaces is unusable. From the side of the Plesk development team, it would only be necessary that the --with-solr flag be turned on during compilation. I think this is not a big request, from the point of view of who uses it, it is already his responsibility.

 

[johnrdorazio]

I am also looking to enable FTS in my dovecot, the web interface search is quite bad and I need a better search backend. But currently it's not possible to enable any kind of FTS in the Plesk provided dovecot:

• building fts-xapian would require a dovecot-dev package which Plesk does not provide
• building fts-elastic also requires a dovecot-dev package which Plesk does not provide
• solr-fts requires that dovecot is built using --with-solr flag, which Plesk does not do

I'm not currently considering fts-elasticsearch as it doesn't support Elasticsearch 7.x.

Please provide a plesk-dovecot-dev package that would allow to build and FTS plugin for dovecot, and enable --with-solr flag when building a dovecot release to allow for using a solr-fts backend.