Freron MailMate

I’ve noticed that the search facility is a little too eager to get started when doing body-and-common-headers searches, resulting in a brief Spinning Beachball of Death after the first character.

To illustrate this, suppose I want to search the complete text of my entire inbox for the word “asymmetrical”. As soon as I type the “a”, MailMate instantly starts searching for every mail message that has the letter “a” in it, and then tries to display them. This causes MM to grind for a few seconds before it can show me every message ever.

To be fair, it’s impressive how quickly it clears the jam, but it would make more sense if MM wasn’t quite to eager to get started on full-text searches—if it just waited to see if I was going to search for something less generic than “a”, it would probably save itself a fair number of cycles and actually get me the results faster. This can really add up when looking for a particular message and trying to search for a succession of terms that might be in it.

I propose waiting for a half-second (or some other interval) of no typing before searching, but there may be better approaches.