Re: Searching emails on an IMAP server?

[Niklas Morberg <niklas.morberg@axis.com>]

James Leifer <James.Leifer@inria.fr> writes:

> Niklas Morberg <niklas.morberg@axis.com> writes:
>
>> Are there any better options out there? I still want to have
>> all my emails on the IMAP-server, but I don't mind a local
>> copy (as with Zoe). I use a GNU/Linux system, and the
>> IMAP-server is running Exchange.
>
> Hi,

Hi James,

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

Ah, so you already have all your mails available locally?

> Then when I want to search, I populate a directory with symlinks to
> the messages swish++ returned.
>
> Advantages: this gives me nearly instantaneous searching (fraction of
> a second) through all my mail.

Excellent, just what I'm after.

> Disadvantages: the folder of search results does not have the marks
> associated with the real messages nor are mark-changes to the search
> results propogated to the real messages.

That's not a big problem for me.

> BTW, maybe nnir.el has a swish++ driver?

Actually it does. It also supports glimpse, waissearch,
excite, swish-e, namazu and hyrex (and native IMAP search).

The thing I haven't found yet is how to get any of these
search methods to play nice with IMAP -- they all seem to
want local files to work with.

Maybe I could run a cron job that copies mail off my IMAP
server and stores them locally (just like Zoe)? Or maybe use
Zoe just as an email fetch script and use another search
engine to index them? A Zoe backed to gnus would be another
option, but I don't think I could pull off writing one.

Thanks for your reply James, I'll do some more googling to
see if I can come up with anything else.

Niklas