On Fri, 24 Aug 2007, Dan Armbrust wrote:

> If you looking to roll your own using a search engine that can handle 
> all of the complex queries that you want to run, I can't recommend 
> Lucene highly enough.  This would be suited to the task far better than 
> a sql database.
>
> http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/
>
> What would be left to you is writing code to turn your e-mail into 
> appropriately structured lucene "documents" - to feed into the indexer.


That sounds excellent!  That concept of preprocessing to make fields for 
the search engine is just what I was hoping to find.  I can use perl or 
whatever to prep the email messages.  Even better, someone else will do it 
for me.  Funny -- the guy I quoted last night who had written about Zoë 
also wrote this article after he dumped Zoë in favor of Lucene 6 months 
later:

http://webservices.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2003/05/13/email.html

Mike