FastMail's Email Search Architecture

Re:FastMail's Email Search Architecture by ams6110 on Sunday November 30, 2014 @09:07PM (#8679154)

If you want Xapian search on a local maildir, I highly recommend notmuch[1]. Adding new mail and updating the index can take noticable time, but searching is super fast, it allows easy custom tagging, and search results are better than gmail in my experience.

I use it from the emacs notmuch mode.

[1] http://notmuchmail.org/

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Re:FastMail's Email Search Architecture by danieldk on Monday December 01, 2014 @01:14AM (#8679767)

I use notmuch, but mu should also be mentioned in the same breath :):

http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/ http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html

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Re:FastMail's Email Search Architecture by gregnbanks on Monday December 01, 2014 @01:34AM (#8679804)

I never used notmuch, but I was much inspired by it when I saw a talk about it at linux.conf.au a few years back. Later I ended up stealing several ideas from notmuch about how to interface with Xapian, like the one-letter prefixes.

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Re:FastMail's Email Search Architecture by darklajid on Monday December 01, 2014 @03:05AM (#8679955)

I'm always a bit jealous when I see this setup (or mu).

But I don't use emacs, and that seems to lead to subpar support and crazy hacks to get something up and working, unfortunately.

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Re:FastMail's Email Search Architecture by danieldk on Monday December 01, 2014 @03:08AM (#8679964)

But I don't use emacs,

Me neither, but mutt-kz had built-in support for notmuch. Not the hacky kind that calls 'notmuch', but it actually links against libnotmuch.

http://kzak.redcrew.org/doku.php?id=mutt:start

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Re:FastMail's Email Search Architecture by darklajid on Monday December 01, 2014 @03:42AM (#8680026)

That looks really neat. You ruined my day (in terms of productivity), but might've given me a nice early Christmas present. Thank you!

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Re:FastMail's Email Search Architecture by xorcist on Monday December 01, 2014 @05:42AM (#8680336)

I can second this recommendation. I've used mutt-kz for about two years now as my primary email interface and it's been rock solid.

I came from regular mutt so there was no learning curve, but that shouldn't be too bad either once you get used to those keybindings.

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Re:FastMail's Email Search Architecture by gh02t on Monday December 01, 2014 @10:36AM (#8681550)

There's also Alot, which is a Python frontend for notmuch. I love it, and use it daily. https://github.com/pazz/alot

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Re:FastMail's Email Search Architecture by jamespo on Monday December 01, 2014 @04:57AM (#8680221)

Similarly I use mairix

http://www.rpcurnow.force9.co.uk/mairix/

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Re:FastMail's Email Search Architecture by pmoriarty on Sunday November 30, 2014 @09:57PM (#8679274)

Can notmuch do regular expression searches?

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Re:FastMail's Email Search Architecture by gregnbanks on Monday December 01, 2014 @01:41AM (#8679811)

Xapian supports a query syntax which uses a trailing '*', but it's not a true wildcard/regexp, it's a range search on an ordered index. Notmuch allows you to use that syntax, see http://notmuchmail.org/searching/

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Re:FastMail's Email Search Architecture by ams6110 on Sunday November 30, 2014 @10:10PM (#8679324)

It can do simple wildcarding with the * character, but I'm not aware of any general regexp capability, same as with any indexed database. Since you still have the underlying maildirs you can always just use egrep I guess.

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