Re: nnir and fast email searches

[James Leifer <James.Leifer@inria.fr>]

Max Froumentin <max@lapin-bleu.net> writes:

> Hi, 
>
> As my email folders grow bigger than my computer gets faster, I'm
> looking for a fast way to search through them. It seems that a simple

[Here's an edited reply I sent to the list a couple of weeks ago,
reporting good performance with swish++.  It assumes that you have one
message per file, which may well not be your case since you're
interested in grepmail.]

Hi,

I run a nightly cron job that indexes all my mail, which consists of
about 30K messages stored in maildir or mh format (one file per
message).  The indexing is performed by swish++ which is easy to get
and available prepackaged under Debian woody and many other distros.

When I want to search, I populate a directory with symlinks to the
messages swish++ returns.

Advantages: this gives me nearly instantaneous searching (fraction of
a second) through all my mail.

Disadvantages (I'd love to have solved):

* the folder of search results does not have the marks associated with
  the real messages;
 
* marking a message in the search result doesn't propogate the marks
  to the real messages.

* refiling a message in the search results doesn't affect the real
  message

I believe nnir.el can use swish++, though I don't know nnir.el well.
I'be always built the folder myself (with my own scripts).

Cheers,
-James