On Sat, Mar 15, 2003 at 10:22:23AM +0000, Simon Wistow wrote: > 1. Directory full of individual mail files (i.e maildir)
I found mairix useful for searching mail archives - it indexed hundreds of thousands of messages in a reasonable time, and can add messages incrementally as they arrive. When you search, it creates a pseudo-folder full of symlinks to the actual messages which you can read with mutt/imap/whatever. You can search for words appearing in the body, subject, sender/recipient, and you can search by date. It has some rudimentary support for fetching whole threads (where one or more message in the thread matches your query). Any lack of snazziness is made up for by the fact that the search result appear *instantly* - you can refine a dozen times before mutt would have returned anything from the first search over message bodies. I'd love to see a perl interface but reading perlguts makes my head hurt. apt-get install mairix or http://www.rc0.org.uk/mairix/
