Thanks for breaking alias search

[pjwalsh]

Originally Posted by ferrety

~ Demanding a password to change alias settings (which I do every day) is a major pain & utterly pointless...
For me this has turned using my email into a bloody nightmare

Without password protection, it would take a savvy passerby maybe 20 sec to edit an alias to forward a copy of all incoming mail to any address of their choosing, without you ever being the wiser.

[JamesHenderson]

Originally Posted by JeremyNicoll

...but search will not find anything if I type in eg d.2 or as you found, 84.

d*.*2 should work, as should *84

[JeremyNicoll]

Interesting... The *84 idea does work, but d*.*2 does not. However *d.2 does.

Did you just experiment, or did you find a useful help page somewhere?

[JamesHenderson]

Originally Posted by JeremyNicoll

Interesting... The *84 idea does work, but d*.*2 does not. However *d.2 does.

Did you just experiment, or did you find a useful help page somewhere?

I experimented. d*.*2 worked foe me - no clue why it didn't for you - sorry!

[BritTim]

Originally Posted by JeremyNicoll

Interesting... The *84 idea does work, but d*.*2 does not. However *d.2 does.

Did you just experiment, or did you find a useful help page somewhere?

It is worth remembering that some valid search strings will nevertheless end up with search failures, if there are many messages, as they time out. Search strings with multiple '*' are a good candidate for timeouts. They try to match as much text as possible, then need to backtrack when later parts of the search string do not match. This is computationally expensive.

[JeremyNicoll]

> It is worth remembering...

This is not a discussion about searching messages, but instead one about using the search box on the Settings -> Users & Aliases screen of the FM webmail interface.

FM seem to have replaced a simple substring search with a more complex one that does not find things easily.

[BritTim]

Originally Posted by JeremyNicoll

> It is worth remembering...

This is not a discussion about searching messages, but instead one about using the search box on the Settings -> Users & Aliases screen of the FM webmail interface.

FM seem to have replaced a simple substring search with a more complex one that does not find things easily.

Regular expressions are, indeed, tricky if you are not used to them.

[JeremyNicoll]

> Regular expressions are, indeed, tricky if you are not used to them.

I think I am used to them. I'd noted before that they use POSIX Extended REs but when I tried to find that info again in their help system a few minutes ago I was surprised not to be able to. Searching in 'Help' for regex produced only 4 hits, all Sieve-related. See: https://www.fastmail.com/help/search/?q=regex

Also, if searching the Users & Aliases page did allow regex one might expect \. to find a literal dot in an alias value, and it does not seem to.

If on the other hand their normal message-search logic is in use, one would expect a value enclosed in quotes to work, and it doesn't.

However it now works, it is much less useful than a filtered display where you're only shown those aliases whose values contain the literal characters you type in the search box.

[SideshowBob]

It seems to be a simple glob, but anchored only on the left.

[JeremyNicoll]

Originally Posted by SideshowBob

It seems to be a simple glob, but anchored only on the left.

If you only have simple alias values, it may seem so. But if you recall I said earlier that for aliases of form:

pz.df.qa.word.2784@domain

the search will find things if it looks for some or all of any of the individual parts of that, so for example

p or pz
d or df
q or qa
w or wo or wor or word
2 or 27 or 278 or 2784

all filter the display in a sensible way. The problem seems to be that the search only looks at the characters between the dots AND it treats each 'word' as a separate entity.

So a search for, for eg: wor works, even though that's a long way from being anchored at the left of the alias' value.

That might as well have been implemented without any sort of wildcard use, as a simple "does the alias contain 'wor'?" test is enough to make that work, and is easy to understand.

But a search for eg rd or ord does not work. It only works if you code eg *rd, and I think that that's satisfied not by logic that matches "*rd" against "pz.df.qa.word.2784@domain", but logic that maches it against "word" or maybe ".word".

And compared with a simple subtring search that would find "f.q" easily, here you need something like "*f.q".

And all that might be fine, if there was any help available that told anyone how this works... but there isn't.

[SideshowBob]

Originally Posted by JeremyNicoll

all filter the display in a sensible way. The problem seems to be that the search only looks at the characters between the dots AND it treats each 'word' as a separate entity.

It does both as far as I can see. It match against the whole string or an individual 'word'.

[JeremyNicoll]

Originally Posted by SideshowBob

It does both as far as I can see. It match against the whole string or an individual 'word'.

When you introduce an asterisk, yes. But not without.

[vehicularsin]

Originally Posted by ferrety

I use alias emails for everything. One for every company, I often disable them to stop spam & re-enable before placing an order or if I phoned and need a response. It was quick & easy, it worked.

Before today, I'd go to aliases & type a bit of the company's name in the search box. I contain the company name within the email address so it is easy to identify. It cannot be at the beginning because it can cause problems sending an email from Welches7yuj7@fastmail.com to welchesfruit@wherevever.com

So I give each alias prefix before a bit of the company name so it would be Treeswelches7yui7@fastmail.com.
I could search the alias list in a second have the correct email address by typing in welches. I can see if it is enabled or not & change it if needed. Easy Peasy

Until Fastmail ruined it. Search is now broken. Review Run 3 online.
Searching for Welches shows no matches & the word none appears in the Alias section. If I search for anything that isn't the start of the email address it can no longer recognise it. So if I search for trees I get the entire alias list.

~ Alias search broken by the update
~ Demanding a password to change alias settings (which I do every day) is a major pain & utterly pointless. This is about as sensible as making us give a password to change the background
For me this has turned using my email into a bloody nightmare

The OP's method appears to be questionable in the first place.

[JeremyNicoll]

I've raised a ticket with FM, asking for their comments on this.

[JeremyNicoll]

Originally Posted by vehicularsin

The OP's method appears to be questionable in the first place.

There's no point in making an observation like that, unless you explain what you think is wrong with the OP's method.

Whatever the OP used to do, it no longer works. But it did work, for them, in the past.