[TriLUG] searchable mail archive

[Peter Neilson]

Personally I use Opera and find that because it uses some sort of DB-type  
storage internally (no, I've never lifted up the hood and looked!) it is  
tremendously fast at searching my several years of mail for any desired  
string. Opera only slows down if I make it top-heavy with open web pages  
that are active, (or have something else churning mightily) and then the  
swap daemon eats up all the CPU's capability.

On Thu, 21 Feb 2013 16:14:08 -0500, Alan Porter <porter at trilug.org> wrote:

>
> At $WORK, we have a handful of mailman lists that we rely on ENTIRELY  
> TOO MUCH.
>
> Where some would:
> - use a wiki to work together
> - open a bug report to track a problem
> - post their in/out status to a board
> - hold a conversation on a forum
> - mention in passing that they are hungry
> - chuckle quietly to himself
>
> ...in each case, we just blast a message out to the entire mailing list.
>
> Most of our users are running Outlook, and most users do what they are  
> told to do -- they keep their backlog of mail on the Exchange server.   
> So even a simple search is very slow.  (Some more enlightened users run  
> "better" mail clients and keep their $MAILDIRs close at hand... those  
> people tend not to have these search problems... but that's a much  
> larger cultural fight).
>
> So now we're looking for a tool to allow us to quickly search our  
> mailing list history.
>
> Our group does not have direct access to the mail server, but we're  
> thinking it might make sense to have a dummy user that subscribes to the  
> mailing lists, stores the mail archives locally, and runs a web server  
> and a web-based search tool that can do the searches and return results.
>
> Do any of you guys have suggestions for such a mail archive searcher  
> server?
>
> Or -- without pointing out that "we're doing it wrong" -- is there a  
> tweak we can make to our process that might make this task a little  
> easier?