Full-Text Search

Overview

Full-text search allows all messages to be indexed, so that mail clients can quickly and efficiently search messages by their full text content.

The dovecot-solr Plugin is used in conjunction with Apache Solr running in a separate container. This is quite straightforward to setup using the following instructions.

Setup Steps

1. docker-compose.yml:

     solr:
       image: lmmdock/dovecot-solr:latest
       volumes:
         - solr-dovecot:/opt/solr/server/solr/dovecot
       restart: always
   
     mailserver:
       image: mailserver/docker-mailserver:latest
       ...
       volumes:
         ...
         - ./etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-plugin.conf:/etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-plugin.conf:ro
       ...
   
   volumes:
     solr-dovecot:
       driver: local
   

2. etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-plugin.conf:

   mail_plugins = $mail_plugins fts fts_solr
   
   plugin {
     fts = solr
     fts_autoindex = yes
     fts_solr = url=http://solr:8983/solr/dovecot/ 
   }
   

3. Start the solr container: docker-compose up -d --remove-orphans solr

4. Restart the mailserver container: docker-compose restart mailserver

5. Flag all user mailbox FTS indexes as invalid, so they are rescanned on demand when they are next searched: docker-compose exec mailserver doveadm fts rescan -A

Further Discussion

See #905