A good way to archive and search a large store of email on my computer?

• How to store and search lots of old email. Hi. Maybe the green can help with this. I'm re-arranging a bunch of old email archives. I'm generally of the "Keep it all" philsophy w. email. And I've got a several years worth of mail now. What I want to do is keep my current mail (say the past year or so) in my email client (outlook) and online via web (fastmail). But I want to keep all the older stuff separate, in a searchable store. (Because both outlook and Fastmail get unhappy when dealing w. multiple gigs of email, and because I don’t really need emails from 4 years ago popping up every time I do a search) So… What I imagine I want is an email client that meets the following criteria: - Works well w. standard Unix Mbox-type files - Has indexed search capability - Works happily with very large store of email (say several gigs) - Has reasonably powerful capacity for doing advanced searches. - Bonus points for searching inside attachements - Bonus points for being free. I’ve looked at a bunch of possible solutions, none seem right. Eudora: Doesn’t play well w. standard Mbox files. (Notably – it doesn’t read attachments. I think there are other little problems, too). The Bat: Recommended for large mailstores. But doesn’t have indexed search Outlook: Too many problems to list Thunderbird: No indexed search Opera M2: Little if any advanced search I’ve also looked into a couple of programs that aren’t email clients that seemed possibly helpful: ImapSize, and Mailbag Assistant. But they didn’t quite do the job either. I’m sort of surprised that a program that matches these criteria is so hard to find. Surely I can’t be the only person who wants to be able to store and search a large collection of email? Anyone have any suggestions? (Gmail, I guess, might be a possibility, though I’m not sure I can see how that would work. Does anyone use Gmail in this way? Is it possible to upload lots of old email folders to it? ) Alternately – does anyone have other smart ideas/strategies for keeping all your old mail in a way that lets you get at it easily, quickly, without it getting the way of your day-to-day work?

• Answer:

  I've got three solutions to this problem, none perfect. I've forwarded all my mail to gmail for the past two years and use it for searches. It's great at that. Your initial import is a bit trickier but there must be some solution. I use http://grepmail.sourceforge.net/ on plain mbox files with some regularity. It's not indexed, but it's fast enough for the occasional "find that old email" problem. I've built my own quick and dirty mail search program three times; once using Lucene, once using MySQL full text, once using mg. They all worked but not very well, email is just a specific enough data schema you want a really good custom tool.