Indexing Mail

Indexing your mail using glimpse can be done from within exmh, but it's often more useful to have cron do this for you so you can seach your mail easily.

Exmh recommends glimpse for this, and whilst there are some licensing funnies with later versions, earlier versions (3.x I beleive) have pretty open licensing.

Here's my cronjobs and script that I run from cron every night to index my mail and perform general hygene of my mail folders, YMMV:

 # pull Mail from IMAP server - exit 0 shuts up cron if there's no mail
 # no mail = exit(1) from fetchmail
 0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /ms/dist/fsf/bin/fetchmail >> /ms/user/a/and/Mail/fetchmail.log 2>&1 ; exit 0
 # clear deleted mail after a week
 3 5 * * 0 find /ms/user/a/and/Mail -name ',*' -mtime +5 -print | xargs  rm
 # index my mail daily
 20 20 * * * /ms/user/a/and/scripts/mailindex

 $ cat /ms/user/a/and/scripts/mailindex
 #!/bin/ksh
 # mailindex - run glimpseindex to index all of $HOME/mail

 #GLIMPSE=/ms/dist/fsf/PROJ/glimpse/3.6/bin/glimpseindex
 #MH_DIR=/ms/dist/fsf/PROJ/mh/6.8.3/
 GLIMPSE=/ms/dist/fsf/PROJ/glimpse/4.1/bin/glimpseindex
 MH_DIR=/ms/dist/fsf/PROJ/nmh/1.0
 MAIL=$HOME/Mail

 # clean the current log
 agelog $MAIL/mailindex.log 7
 echo 'Glimpse log rolls at \c' >$MAIL/mailindex.log
 date >>$MAIL/mailindex.log
 agelog $MAIL/glimpseindex.log 7
 echo 'fetchmail log rolls at \c' >>$MAIL/mailindex.log
 date >>$MAIL/mailindex.log
 agelog $MAIL/fetchmail.log 7
 echo 'procmail log rolls at \c' >>$MAIL/mailindex.log
 date >>$MAIL/mailindex.log
 agelog $MAIL/procmail.log 7
 echo 'procmail log rolls finished at \c' >>$MAIL/mailindex.log
 date >>$MAIL/mailindex.log

 # update $MAIL/.folders
 $MH_DIR/bin/folders -fast -recurse -all | grep -v '^\.glimpse' > $MAIL/.folders
 # pack folders weekly on a Sunday
 if [[ `date +%w` -eq 0 ]]
 then
   # for encoded headers (see exmh FAQ 2c)
   export MM_CHARSET=iso-8859-1
   for i in `cat $MAIL/.folders | grep -v \.glim`
   do
     rm $MAIL/$i/.xmhcache
     $MH_DIR/bin/folder +$i -pack >>$MAIL/mailindex.log
     $MH_DIR/bin/scan +$i -noheader >$MAIL/$i/.xmhcache
   done
 fi

 # build up glimpseindexes
 for i in `cat $MAIL/.folders | grep -v \.glim`
 do
   if [[ ! -d $MAIL/.glimpse/$i ]]
   then
     mkdir -p $MAIL/.glimpse/$i
     # make sure we don't index subfolders or deleted files
     # your home dir will get very big without this
     # one run of glimpseindex from the exmh front end will create this file
     cp $MAIL/.glimpse/inbox/.glimpse_exclude $MAIL/.glimpse/$i
   fi
   echo "Glimpsindex starting $i at \c" >>$MAIL/mailindex.log
   date >>$MAIL/mailindex.log
   # glimpse stats cumulate in this file
   if [[ -f "$MAIL/.glimpse/$i/.glimpse_statistics" ]]
   then
     mv $MAIL/.glimpse/$i/.glimpse_statistics $MAIL/.glimpse/$i/.glimpse_statistics.old
   fi
   $GLIMPSE -H $MAIL/.glimpse/$i $MAIL/$i | egrep '(Indexing|Size)' >> $MAIL/glimpseindex.log
   echo "Glimseindex finishing $i at \c" >>$MAIL/mailindex.log
   date >>$MAIL/mailindex.log
 done