Why do I receive a timeout when searching a large mail account?

Question

 I often receive timeouts when I search for larger email accounts through the webmail interface. Why is that?  

Answer

When searching through larger mail accounts, you often encounter a timeout from the search query. While this is the expected result for a larger email account, you can utilize the Dovecot feature Solr FTS to speed up the search feature for the user's mail folders.

IMAP Full-Text Search Indexing

In cPanel & WHM version 64, we introduced IMAP Full-Text Search Indexing (powered by Solr), which provides fast search capabilities for Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) mailboxes. This significantly improves the speed and convenience of the search experience for iOS device, Microsoft Outlook®, SquirrelMail, Horde, Roundcube, and Mozilla Thunderbird users. You can enable this feature via the WHM's Manage Plugins interface (Home >> cPanel >> Manage Plugins), or the command line interface. For more information read our Manage Plugins or The install_dovecot_fts Script documentation.

From the command line, you can install this with:

/usr/local/cpanel/scripts/install_dovecot_fts