[plug] Searching Email

[James Devenish]

In message <1089843290.32090.3.camel at latte.internal.itmaze.com.au>
on Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 08:14:50AM +1000, Onno Benschop wrote:
> I have 530 mailboxes with 1.4Gb of mail since 1997.

On the machine I'm using to write this message, I have 1.8GB of e-mail
in about half as many mailboxes, so perhaps I have a similar problem. I
think the problem has been raised on this list before but no one knew
the magic bullet.

> Evolution allows you to search per box, but 1.4Gb of mail in one box is
> not useful. I used to grep, then locate the mailbox, then go and read
> the message, this is annoying me.

I suggest you steal the Gmail source code. But seriously...

People on this list have previously suggested grepmail, so I once hoped
it would be a great solution (regardless of whether it has indexing or
not). However, its resource consumption makes it impractical for me. And
even if it delivers a set of matches, I may need to reconstruct the
entire thread (which will sometimes be spread across multiple
mailboxes). This suggests I need a unified index of Message-IDs =>
mailing list archive solutions. That is, feed every stored message into
a full-text 'mailing list' indexer that is designed to be able to
reconstruct mail/news threads. I don't use Evolution so I don't know if
you could expect any 'plug-ins' to help with this.

Cameron has mentioned the "Lurker" list archiver, which is web-based but
does *not* store HTML copies of every message (phew). Here is his demo
site: http://cp.yi.org/lurker/splash/index.html I promise not to post
that URL to Slashdot ;-) I notice that the 'List' option has a default
setting of 'Any mailing list'. This suggests that it might be good for
people with lots of mailboxes.

> I'm happy to launch a web-browser - there is one running most of the
> time any way - but what do others use?