On Thu, 23 Aug 2007, Florin Iucha wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 23, 2007 at 09:33:20PM -0500, Mike Miller wrote:
>> I am interested in a Linux FOSS solution, by the way.
>>
>> I need a way to search through old email messages quickly and efficiently.
>> I would use this for listserv archives and, I hope, for personal email.
>
> Have you tried http://swish-e.org/ or http://www.namazu.org/ ?


Thanks for the tips.  I haven't tried swish in about 10 years, but I did 
use it way back then.  It looks like it has come a long way.  I've never 
tried namazu.

They look like good engines but I wonder if they allow for email-specific 
kinds of queries.  For example, if I want to find every message where 
"jones" (case insensitive) is found in the cc field and "linux" is found 
in the message body, will they allow for that?  I think they treat 
messages as files and could only go so far as to find messages that 
contain both terms jones and linux without regard to the part of the 
message the terms are in.  This would be much like WebGlimpse (or a little 
better than that), which I have been using for a few years.

I'm looking for something that has special email-specific features and is 
not a general file-searching engine.  The namazu HTML filters are a step 
in the right direction and maybe the MHonArc and pipermail filters are 
even better.  Namazu might be really nice for searching though all sorts 
of files on your Linux box, kinda like Google Desktop in Windows.  It 
doesn't seem to be quite what I'm looking for, but that might not exist.

Thanks again!

Mike