Solutions for E-mail indexing/filing?

Fri Aug 12 09:58:43 PDT 2005

On Sat, Aug 06, 2005 at 10:19:56PM -0700, Michael T. Halligan wrote:
> Dealing with hundreds of clients, friends, vendors, etc, I'm starting to 
> find it rather annoying to only have part
> of a conversation in any one sub-folder, or remembering a conversation 
> thread, but not necessarily a subject line, and having
> to wade through dozens/hundreds of e-mails to look it up.

> What would be very ideal, would be a system where, when I file an e-mail 
> into a subfolder, I can also add a tag to that e-mail, and have
> that e-mail indexed into a database of sorts.. I can then put a 
> description on that tag, and associate it to a customer, project, etc.

> Has anybody come accross something like this?

 Many eons ago I used to use glimpse (http://webglimpse.net/) for this.
 However, I stopped dropped it a number of years ago.  (Its license was
 sufficiently non-free that it's not available in Debian and I only ever
 used it on my personal workstations which is where most of my e-mail
 resides).

 However, while writing this message I did decide to poke around for
 an alternative since I remember that having my mail indexed was handy
 when I used to do so.  I installed "swish++" (using apt-get under
 Debian) and did some quick tests with it.  It looks adequate for my
 needs.  I mostly use MH folders and simplying running:

    cd ~/mh; index++ -e 'mail:[0-9a-zA-Z]*' .

 ... seemed to do the trick for creating the index; letting run for
 a bit while I did other stuff

 There's an incremental indexing option which I'll have to use to update
 the indexes; I'll learn about that later.

-- 
Jim Dennis