Debian Package a Day ([info]debaday) wrote,
@ 2004-07-09 08:00:00
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grepmail - search mailboxes for mail matching an expression
Grepmail looks for mail messages containing a pattern, and prints the resulting messages. Usage is very similar to grep. It can handle compressed mailbox files, and can search the header or body of emails. It also supports searches constrained by date and size.

Lucas N. suggested grepmail. This utility is most useful with mbox style mail folders. Of course, if one stores email in Maildir format, a simple grep -rl pattern Maildir/ will do the trick. Well, minus the header/body features of grepmail. But then, you might as well use perl if you want to do that (better regexes too).

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grepmail and maildir
(Anonymous)
2004-07-10 12:51 am UTC (link)
If you want to use such a setup with maildir or MH have a look at "mairix".

best regards,
-mika-
http://www.michael-prokop.at/blog/

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Re: grepmail and maildir
(Anonymous)
2004-07-12 10:25 am UTC (link)
mairix homepage (http://www.rc0.org.uk/mairix/) for the google-impaired. ;-)
official debian mairix package (http://packages.debian.org/mairix) for the debian-impaired. ;-)

mairix appears to have the added feature of creating an index, much like updatedb/slocate, which should make searching "instantaneous". i find maildirs easier to handle (especially for incremental tar usage where you don't want a huge mbox added to an incremental tar only because a single email was added to the mbox) and compatible with file utilities (rm, cp, mv, grep). plus doesn't that uphold the unix philosophy that everything is a file (though i guess it just depends on how granular you want it: mail folder, mail message, mail headers + body)? anyways, didn't mean to turn this isn't a maildir rant.

thanks for pointing out mairix. i just wanted to elaborate on it a little with my findings (maybe save somebody the time i just spending researching it).

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