Comment by Koffiepoeder 2 days ago
I have a (non-published) plugin that I'm using that is capable of using elasticsearch for indexing & search from within Thunderbird. I never bothered publishing it, since I never really wanted to maintain it/build a business out of it. Would this be something you are interested in, potentially for a small fee?
I do agree that it is a bad choice, though the reason for this is historical; after quite some testing and comparisons, the best JS-based index I could find at the time was elasticlunr [0]. It may very well be the case that there are better wasm alternatives available currently.
Over time I then added a non-JS, external index. Since I already had an ES cluster running elsewhere anyway and the querying of elasticlunr and ElasticSearch is forwards compatible, I decided to just opt for re-using my ES cluster.
In short, the decisionmaking was a mix of historical and compatibility/ease-of-maintenance reasons.
Yeah, if you already have elasticsearch running it's a good choice. Most people are not going to have that or want to run and maintain elasticsearch though. Reasonable decisions for your situation though!
I'll see what I can cobble together somewhere in the course of the weekend/next week ;) Probably need to file off some rough edges and hardcoded stuff.
Elasticsearch is a pretty bad choice for what really needs to be an embedded database. There are other FTS engines out there of varying quality that would be better suited to this particular case. Off the top of my head, Meillisearch and sqlite3's FTS5 would both be highly embed-able but have other tradeoffs (such as storage overhead).