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

[James Devenish]

In message <Pine.LNX.3.96.1030709232528.5974C-100000 at cyllene.uwa.edu.au>
on Wed, Jul 09, 2003 at 11:47:14PM +0800, Denis Brown wrote:
> 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, ...

Here is the first conflict: "large mail spool", "only selected e-mails".
If, my "large mail spool" your mean mbox, then the problem is that there
is no index for the file, so users of the mail spool have to parse the
entire file.  Suggestions: create your own index (e.g. using procmail)
or use a different mailbox format (e.g. binary-format or multi-file).
Just doing a quick Google, perhaps you could look at the merits of using
mairix with maildir/MH.

> 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.
[...]
> 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?

I've never used IMAP but I would have thought that if you're filing Joe
Bloggs' e-mail in your 'Widgets' folder, you need only visit your
Widgets folder and search for your specified e-mail. How could your
browser download unwanted mail?

> 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.

Not if you run your mail client on a remote host (e.g. the server on
which your mail is spooled).

BTW. You keep misspelling 'mutt' as 'elm' or sometimes 'pine'. Perhaps
check if your keyboard layout is still set to QWERTY :)