* Michael Kjorling <mich...@kjorling.com> [20090118 19:24]: > On 18 Jan 2009 12:50 -0500, by ptilopt...@gmail.com (Patrick Shanahan): > >> I often find myself in the situation of wanting to find messages > >> "from" a given person, that have been replied to (immediate child node > >> in the thread tree) by another given person > > > > with mairix you may define a date range, from, subject, disk location, > > message to and words appearing in the body. You may even define > > negatives and fuzzy searchs, or's and and's. > > > > mairix d:3d- f:some...@foo.bar t:someb...@bar.foo/me...@xzy.jik \ > > s:finding,messages,from,one,person b:mutt > > So let's take a real life example. A fairly busy mailing list (let's > say between 500 and 1500 posts per month), with some people being much > more active than others. someb...@example.com is an active poster, and > anot...@example.org is less so but still a fairly regular contributor. > I remember that "somebody" made a post in the not too distant past > (say, the last half year), to which "another" replied, spawning a > discussion that is relevant to me now, but I don't remember the exact > (perhaps technical) terms used in that discussion, only the gist of > the discussion. (That's part of the reason why I want to find it.) > However, while "another" posts less often than "somebody", there are > still enough posts from that person as well that simply filtering on > sender will give a really long list of hits - especially if I don't > remember when the discussion took place. The mailing list posts are > saved in a given folder and once I identify the thread, obviously I > can easily go to the main mailbox to read it in full. > > Now. How would I invoke mairix to help me with this scenario? Because > unless I am missing something big, mairix won't really help (it works > on a message-by-message basis and has no understanding of threads) and > by the time mairix has made its selection and I am in its output > mailbox, there is no easy way to reference the other messages in the > threads that the messages found by mairix are a part of. The closest I > can think of is still to use mutt's filtering capabilities in the > original mailbox to find all threads with posts from both individuals, > and then go through that manually, but that can mean having to go > through a potentially huge list of irrelevant posts. I'm hoping that > either mutt or some other tool would be able to help me sift through > that list. >
mairix has an option "-t" which grabs the thread for the message that your search matches and dumps the whole thread in the destination folder. I use it all the time when I search mailing lists, such as LKML (2000-3000 messages per week) or a couple of internal mailing lists to where I work, that have the type volume that you describe. So - you know that the message was from person A or person B, to a specific list, sent in the last two weeks. $ mairix -t d:2w- f:pers...@domain.a/pers...@domain.b t:l...@address.c If you know a word in the subject or the body, then you can add that to narrow it down. You seem to be facing a rare problem - getting too many hits from your search criteria. Most of the time, I end up running mairix over and over with increasingly generic searches, broadening the date range, until I get hits and something in my search folder. It's rare that I end up with thousands of hits and a folder that becomes a problem sifting through to find what I'm looking for. So, I think mairix is your best bet. -- Anders Rayner-Karlsson <and...@trudheim.co.uk> All-Round Linux Tinkerer, RHCE and PITA DeLuxe
