[Xapian-devel] FastMail's search using Xapian

[Greg Banks]

G'day,

I thought some folks on this list would be interested to know that the new full text email search feature rolled out today by FastMail

http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/04/02/fast-full-message-searching-across-all-folders/

is powered by Xapian. All the code for indexing and searching emails is Open Source and in Fastmail's version of the Cyrus IMAP server.

https://github.com/gnb/cyrus-imapd/tree/fastmail

That isn't the most recent code but its pretty close.
We expect that code will be merged into a future release of Cyrus (but not the next release which is imminent).

We evaluated Solr, Sphinx and Xapian. Sphinx was the fastest but had a number of deployment issues due to our unique requirements.
I must say that the Xapian learning curve put us off for a while, but after gaining experience with other search technologies that became less of a problem.
In the end the ability to run Xapian as a library linked with our C application, and thus to control startup times and memory usage more easily than with a standalone server, was the deciding factor.

Anyway, thanks for a great piece of software, and keep up the good work.

Greg.
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