Indexed mail search?

[Dan Stromberg]

Hi folks.

I have a huge amount of old mail that I very much want to keep around. In
fact, I end up searching through it on a pretty regular basis - and these
searches tend to take a good half hour on a modern machine.

Is there such a thing as *ix software that'll index your e-mail archive,
keep the mail around in a compressed form, and allow you to do rapid
queries of your archived e-mail?

I'm not talking about something like dovecot, which only does headers -
and does a good job of it, too.

I mean something that'll index message bodies, ideally with mime
knowledge and html, in much the same way that google indexes web pages
with html knowledge.

Thanks!

[Douglas O'Neal]

Post by Dan Stromberg
Hi folks.
I have a huge amount of old mail that I very much want to keep around. In
fact, I end up searching through it on a pretty regular basis - and these
searches tend to take a good half hour on a modern machine.
Is there such a thing as *ix software that'll index your e-mail archive,
keep the mail around in a compressed form, and allow you to do rapid
queries of your archived e-mail?
I'm not talking about something like dovecot, which only does headers -
and does a good job of it, too.
I mean something that'll index message bodies, ideally with mime
knowledge and html, in much the same way that google indexes web pages
with html knowledge.
Thanks!

I have used htdig for this in the past. Setup is fairly easy - just have
the spider run through your file system directory instead of URLs. I have
also heard about mairix (http://www.rc0.org.uk/mairix) but have never used
it.

Doug