Re: mail group by author?

[David Engster <deng@randomsample.de>]

Vegard Vesterheim <vegard.vesterheim@uninett.no> writes:
> On Fri, 17 Apr 2009 11:00:16 +0200 David Engster <deng@randomsample.de> wrote:
>
>> To do something like that in Gnus, you need an external indexer. Mairix
>> is just one possibility, but it's well suited for Gnus because it
>> directly creates the resulting mailbox, so you don't have to parse large
>> amounts of output in Emacs Lisp. Alternatively, you could surely also
>> use search engines like Lucene, Xapian, Sphinx, etc., but those would
>> need much more work to interface them with Gnus.
>
> I have great hopes for dbmail (dbmail.org). dbmail has an IMAP-backend
> for retrieving messages. Storing headers (and body) for mail messages
> into a database, opens possibilities for flexible and efficient
> queries and retrieval of email messages.

Thanks for that link, I didn't know of dbmail. This looks pretty similar
to what archiveopteryx does (www.archiveopteryx.org), which however has
support for virtual folders (they call it "views").

Both seem a bit oversized for a single user though, and I guess you
would need your own server to easily access your mail from different
machines? Also, I'm really happy with Dovecot, and there would have to
be some serious advantages to make me switch to something else. And
there are many people who happily use commercial IMAP services
(Fastmail, Google, whatever), which should also be able to have fast
full text search.

What I'd really love to see is a client-only solution, e.g. a program
which creates a *local* index from a *remote* IMAP server.

-David