[plug] client-server e-mail query system?

[Denis Brown]

Dear PLUG list members,

Maybe I'm not getting my terminology correct or my search terms, or maybe
this hasn't been done before???

I'd like to search for, retrieve and display only selected e-mails from a
large mail spool rather than use a more conventional IMAP+browser or
MTA+text client like pine, elm, ...   I'd like to do this over a low
bandwidth link.   Consider this example:

I have thousands of e-mails on a server.   I'm at a remote site, perhaps
with a dial-up connection (low bandwidth) and I want to access the one or
two e-mails from Joe Bloggs, relating to a widget order, received some
time in 2002.   With a POP style solution employing a client like Pegasus
or Eudora, or... I'll be sitting there for hours downloading the stored
mail to my local client, in order to do the search and display locally.
No thanks.

Using IMAP plus a browser is probably better but I'm still going to have
to grab down a lot of unwanted stored mail - no?  Using a client like pine
or elm certainly gives me the option of doing a find (a "Whereis" in
pine-speak) but again I get to grab a lot of superfluous mail in the
process.

Hence the thought: compose an SQL-like query on the remote,
thinly-connected machine, send it to the server and just get back the
search results, the e-mail message(s) and attachment(s) if any.   I dare
say this isn't a unique thought but cannot see it talked about anywhere.
So maybe it's a Bad Idea (tm) for a variety of reasons.  Thoughts /
comments please?

TIA,
Denis