euxane eb15b61e32 dovecot/fts: switch to fts-flatcurve
This switches the full-text search plugin from fts-xapian to
fts-flatcurve, the now preferred indexer still powered by Xapian,
which will be integrated into Dovecot core 2.4.

This sets a sane minimal configuration for the plugin with
international language support.

The plugin options marked as "advanced" in Dovecot's documentation
aren't re-exposed for simplicity. They can nevertheless be overridden
by module consumers by directly setting keys with
`services.dovecot2.pluginSettings.fts_*`.

The `fullTextSearch.{memoryLimit,maintenance}` options are removed as
they are no longer needed for this plugin, which tops at 256MB of RAM
usage by default and incrementally optimises its index.

GitLab: closes https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver/-/issues/239
2025-03-21 19:22:58 +01:00

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Full text search
==========================
By default, when your IMAP client searches for an email containing some
text in its *body*, dovecot will read all your email sequentially. This
is very slow and IO intensive. To speed body searches up, it is possible to
*index* emails with a plugin to dovecot, ``fts_flatcurve``.
Enabling full text search
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To enable indexing for full text search here is an example configuration.
.. code:: nix
{
mailserver = {
# ...
fullTextSearch = {
enable = true;
# index new email as they arrive
autoIndex = true;
enforced = "body";
};
};
}
The ``enforced`` parameter tells dovecot to fail any body search query that cannot
use an index. This prevents dovecot to fall back to the IO-intensive brute
force search.
If you set ``autoIndex`` to ``false``, indices will be created when the IMAP client
issues a search query, so latency will be high.
Resource requirements
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Indices created by the full text search feature can take more disk
space than the emails themselves. By default, they are kept in the
emails location. When enabling the full text search feature, it is
recommended to move indices in a different location, such as
(``/var/lib/dovecot/indices``) by using the option
``mailserver.indexDir``.
.. warning::
When the value of the ``indexDir`` option is changed, all dovecot
indices needs to be recreated: clients would need to resynchronize.
Indexation itself is rather resouces intensive, in CPU, and for emails with
large headers, in memory as well. Initial indexation of existing emails can take
hours.
Mitigating resources requirements
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You can:
* exclude some headers from indexation with ``mailserver.fullTextSearch.headerExcludes``
* disable expensive token normalisation in ``mailserver.fullTextSearch.filters``
* disable automatic indexation for some folders with
``mailserver.fullTextSearch.autoIndexExclude``. Folders can be specified by
name (``"Trash"``), by special use (``"\\Junk"``) or with a wildcard.