Urbane.Tiger

Then you may have seen my posts on this much vexed issue. I can now report that I have got it going reasonably OK. I am using WDS4 Release (I can't find an about box for it) and WLMail 12.0.1606. I have about 300,00 documents indexed, of which about 40,000 are eml's or 'nws's (most would be nws headers). I have done nothing tricky to get it going, but nor am I saying saying it worked out of the box, here is a synopsis.

My Mail Store is located in a non standard location - D:\Application Data\Mail
My WDS Database (Indexes) is located in a non standard location - D:\Application Data\Document Search

I installed WDS4 Release over WDS4 Beta about 2 weeks ago. The install corrupted the existing database and a lost the Included Locations & File Type Filter Settings. I had to go into Safe Mode to delete the corrupted database, the corruption took the form of removing most, but not all of the files. I reset the Included Locations & File Type Settings back to the way I wanted them, basically I index everything (locations that have temporary data or backups are excluded) in every which way possible.

It took about 2 hours to rebuild the indices (both drives are mirrored and striped) before it reached about 260,000 files and went idle. At that time it would only find file name matches not file content matches. It now it finds both file name and content matches, the file count is over 290,000, I have not added 30,000 files in the intervening period - I'm sure it missed some on that first pass. I am equally certain that the indexing is performed in multiple passes over time.

The search treacle box in WLMail functionally works in that it finds the mails I would expect to find with a given search term. But I detest the search as you type feature, it feels as though I'm typing into molasses or silicon sealant - I'm told its a word wheel. IMO the wheel's gone in a rut and the whips come off the handle.

I have yet to install my filters for indexing the contents of ADS's - I don't want to break it. yet.

Re alternatives, if you want integration into MS mail products there aren't any as far as I know. My experience is that the alternatives are just as problematic as WDS. Google chews up resources if you create a a lot of files quickly (eg unpack an iso), Copernic takes too long to detect presence of new files (sometimes days), I have not tried Yahoo. IMO the stand out product is AimAtFile, it uses the XP indexing service which I seems to detect file changes faster than any of the others. AimAtFile lacks the convenience of the others (or at least it did last time I looked), and its payware, not much about $30. I've thought of running WDS just for WLMail Searches and AimAtFile for the heavy duty searches, but I'd want it to do compressed and alternate streams if I have to pay.

Hardware - Gigabyte 965P-S2 rev 3.3 with E6600, 4GRAM, 2 * 250G RAID 0 + RAID 1
Software - XP/Home SP3
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TUT

WLMail (was WLM Deskop),
Windows Live Hotmail (WLH) (was Windows Live Mail)
Windows Live Messenger (WLM) (not to be confused with Windows Messenger (vanilla))
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"NewWorldMan" <kevin@xxxxxx> wrote in message news:6F9F846E-E502-4BA8-8C7B-13F9372B53A5@xxxxxx
OK, I've looked at the various discussions of this and I still can't get it to work. In particular I've checked the store folder, checked eml and nws and verified the indexing service is running. I've rebuilt the WDS index and still no joy.

A while back I tried WDS 3 and had no joy either. To be honest, even if I get it working by further fiddling around the experience shouldn't be like this. It should "just work." To be fair, it does in fact do this for Outlook, as I've tried it at work. WLM has been out quite a while now so I would expect a new version of WDS to work out of the box with it.

I do have Copernic Desktop Search on the system which I think is still the best of the desktop search products. Unfortunately, it does not support WLM, hence why I'm trying WDS. However, it won't be on my PC for much longer at this rate.

I'm normally a huge fan of Microsoft's but they do seem to be losing their touch recently.

My PC is Win XP SP2.

Kevin