Re: [VM] searching in mime encoded email

[Uday Reddy]

Mark Diekhans writes:

> For me, compatibility with mbox format is feature.  I often use
> other applications to scan VM mail folders, such a procmail.  So
> it's not necessarily just mail reading clients.  A program to
> convert back to mbox would suffice.  Although it would still
> remain important for VM to be able to read mbox files without
> modifying them.

No, there is no attempt to get rid of the mbox format.  Recall that the
original question was "how can I save MIME-decoded text?"  One option is to
decode it and leave it in the folder.  Then the folder becomes non-RFC (not
7-bit ASCII any more).  Another option is to decode it and save it to some
other (non-RFC) folder.  A worse option would be to decode it and save it in
an independent file.  I don't see how saving it as an independent file would
be good for anything.  Mail folders are much better for organizing,
categorizing and searching email than file system directory trees are.  In
fact, I think that in the long run, VM will probably turn into a
semantically organized file system for email.  We don't want to give up this
semantic organization in order to satisfy some RFC, which is a historical
relic really.

> For example, Currently I have gigabytes of automatically create
> mbox folders that I need to be able to search and read.  My
> current approach is to use C program to search for patterns and
> then save the matching messages to a mbox file and then open
> that file in VM.  Of course, this is very sub-optimal.  I have
> been trying to determine how to best address this.

Mairix is an email indexing tool with a  VM interface.  Check out this blog
post, for example:

  http://robert-adesam.blogspot.com/

Cheers,
Uday