Rackspace Email & Apps Blog

All users who have upgraded to Harbinger, the new webmail platform we announced last week, will now find a search bar integrated into the header of each message-listing page. We built this new search functionality at the same time we built the new webmail platform because we believe that search becomes increasingly important as users store more information inside of webmail.
In order to make searching for email as fast and accurate as possible, we’re now indexing all messages as they come into our system. We’re using Lucene, a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library, to help with the indexing, and lots of Ajax on the front-end. The combination of the two technologies makes search really fast, which was one of the top goals with this project.
Here are some cool features of search:
- Search the current email folder
- Search all email folders with one-click
- Search RSS feed folders
- Search the web via Google
- Use Advanced Search to refine your search
- Quickly search for the same search phrase in different folders
- Refine your search based on whether or not messages contain attachments
At this point in time you can only use search for email and RSS feeds. But we’re not going to stop there… so stay tuned!
A special thanks goes out to Wenjie, the team lead on this project, as well as Nguyen, Wenjie’s partner in crime. The two of them did an outstanding job on this project, one that will surely bring lots of value to all webmail users.