Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net> writes: > > One of my long-standing wishes is to be able to say "show me mails in my > inbox from people who have replied to messages i've sent them". > > This could be re-framed as "show me threads in which i've participated, > where there are some messages flagged with 'inbox'". but generating a > huge list of all threads in which i've participated, just to be able to > do an intersection operation with a (much smaller) list of all threads > that have a message with the inbox flag seems like a pretty gross > inefficiency. At the moment the best we could do is essentially the same algorithm, but in C instead of shell / python. Threads are not documents in the database, so they can't efficiently be searched for. Of course we could change that, but those kind of changes take a fair amount of effort, and some careful design work. d