All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Pine, meet Mairix

samtregar on 2005-02-05T17:14:52

I found a great piece of software on Freshmeat yesterday - Mairix. It's a program that indexes and searches email stored in a variety of formats, including Maildir. I know what you're thinking - big deal, Glimpse/grep/etc. does that fine. The hook is that Mairix returns results as a complete mail folder in Maildir, mbox or mh format. When it builds a Maildir result set it actually just makes symbolic links to the matches, which is quite cool.

That means I can drop to shell from Pine, run a Mairix search and pop back into Pine to view the results just by switching to the "match" folder. Eventually I'd like to add smoother integration with Pine but for now I'm pretty happy.

I just saved myself a ton of time with this command:

mairix f:company spreadsheet

That found me the spreadsheet that someone at "company" sent me last month. Using Pine's built-in searching over IMAP I probably would have spent ten minutes looking for that mail. Instead, I spent it writing this entry.

Of course it's also incredibly fast and can limit searches by date, size and several other vectors.

-sam

Works with Mail.app :)

melo on 2005-02-05T18:49:27

If you use a Mac, and Mail.app, check this out:

http://www.simplicidade.org/notes/archives/2005/02/using_mairix_wi.html

Re:Works with Mail.app :)

samtregar on 2005-02-05T19:11:04

Very cool. But I bet you'll wish Mail.app was open-source when I add Mairix integration to Pine, huh?

-sam

Re:Works with Mail.app :)

melo on 2005-02-05T23:42:41

Not really :), Spotlight is around the corner, and hacking a mail client is not something that makes me more happy.

I prefer other topics.

But if you use pine, you should keep an eye on Beagle. Yes, it's GUI-oriented, but I guess that will change with time, and it gives you what I want with spotligh: automatic indexing.

Best regards,

Re:Works with Mail.app :)

samtregar on 2005-02-06T04:12:06

What is Beagle? I did a Google search for "beagle mail" but didn't get anything interesting...

-sam

Re:Works with Mail.app :)

melo on 2005-02-06T12:30:13

Check this out:

http://www.gnome.org/projects/beagle/
http://www.gnome.org/projects/beagle/

Also, I forgot to mention: mairix does not need to integrate with Mail.app. Check this page (http://the.taoofmac.com/space/blog/2005-02-05.23%3A00), in the middle. You can search via mairix with Quicksilver, so I'm home :)

Best regards,

Re:Works with Mail.app :)

melo on 2005-02-06T12:32:00

err... the second URL should be

http://nat.org/demos/

Best regards,

Re:

Aristotle on 2005-02-05T20:55:42

Old hat. ;-) See Virtual Folders in mutt.