I'm working on a webmail client, and I need to search for email messages based on a keyword and sort the results by date in a single IMAP command. I know that IMAP provides SEARCH for searching and sorting is typically done on the client side. However, I wonder if there's a way to combine both actions, i.e. searching and sorting in a single IMAP command for more efficient processing. Is this possible with IMAP, or is there a workaround to achieve this?
The webmail client is in PHP and JavaScript.
The goal is to streamline the process of retrieving and presenting relevant email messages to the user based on their search criteria and sorting preferences.
The sort and uid sort commands do exactly what you want. Here's a command to search for messages from me, sort them by size and return their UIDs:
a uid sort (size) utf-8 from "[email protected]"
The charset argument is mandatory (unlike SEARCH) and indicates the character encoding of the the searching criteria string. By default, you may use us-ascii instead of utf-8 as well.