Searching in all mails ...

[Stefan Waldherr <swa@cs.cmu.edu>]

is quite a pain in gnus. It would be really nice to have a feature (possibly
thru `G w' in the group buffer?) that searches thru all mails. glimpse is a
very fast search engine (http://glimpse.cs.arizona.edu/, there is also an
.rpm) that seems very good for this kind of task.

glimpse requires an index to search, so you index your mail regularily in a
cron job, for example

	glimpseindex -o -H ~/Mail/ ~/Mail/

This tells glimpse to index ~/Mail and leave an index file (size in this case
about 7-9% of all files) in ~/Mail/.glimpse_*.

Searching the index is even easier, for example

	glimpse -H ~/Mail/ 'web;server;account'

looks in the index file, that glimpse finds in ~/Mail/.glimpse_*) and returns
a list of matching mails in the form

/home/swa/Mail/bxx-users/14: An RWI web server account will be needed and is
availble free on request.
/home/swa/Mail/bxx-users/17: >An RWI web server account will be needed and is
availble free on request.

Wouldn't this be an extremely useful feature?

Stefan.
-- 
Stefan Waldherr                office +1 (412) 268-3837
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