Why search just mail? If you store your mail as files and put in place a search engine, the views and searches you want to make will work for it all.
On 11/1/05, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > on the other hand, what is the downside of keeping one message > > per file? the upside is that no indexing is required. > > i'd say that an advantage of going for an indexed scheme is that one > could potentially index attributes other than message number. > > i've never got around to biting the bullet on this, but i've long > thought that it would be very nice to have a version of upas/fs which > could offer different views onto the same mailbox. one could > implement a clone-file style filesystem where each line directory > holds a some subset of the messages in the overall mailbox, determined > by writing a control message, e.g. a regexp restriction on a given > header line. suitable indexing, and a little extra acme support could > make this a smooth experience. > > i keep many of my old mail messages around, and it's painful to search > through them - i usually end up using grep -n, and plumbing the > mailbox file into acme, which has at least the advantage that it > doesn't use up all my memory. however it's not a particularly > pleasant experience, and i'd love to see something better. > > BTW, one advantage of a file-per-message format is that it enables > straightforward annotation of messages without relying on > mailbox-to-index-file consistency. i don't know how others use mail, > but i'd find some sort of annotation useful (e.g. read/unread, intent > to reply), and maybe this is a possible reason for changing the > storage format. i'm not sure though. reading many files and > directories will inevitably slow things down (a quick estimate on my > current 23MB mbox shows that it would take just over 4 times as many > 9P transactions to read the whole thing if each message were stored as > the a separate file). >
