mh-e: Searching
15 Searching Through Messages
*****************************
Earlier, the command ‘F s’ (‘mh-search’) was introduced which helps you
find messages that lie buried in your folders (
Folders). This
chapter covers this command in more detail. Several commands are used
to compose the search criteria and to start searching. A couple of them
can be found in the ‘Search’ menu.
‘C-c ?’
Display cheat sheet for the MH-E commands (‘mh-help’).
‘C-c C-c’
Find messages using ‘mh-search-program’ (‘mh-index-do-search’).
‘C-c C-p’
Find messages using ‘pick’ (‘mh-pick-do-search’).
‘C-c ?’
Display cheat sheet for the MH-E commands (‘mh-help’).
‘C-c C-f a’
‘C-c C-f C-a’
Move to ‘Mail-Reply-To:’ header field (‘mh-to-field’).
‘C-c C-f b’
‘C-c C-f C-b’
Move to ‘Bcc:’ header field (‘mh-to-field’).
‘C-c C-f c’
‘C-c C-f C-c’
Move to ‘Cc:’ header field (‘mh-to-field’).
‘C-c C-f d’
‘C-c C-f C-d’
Move to ‘Dcc:’ header field (‘mh-to-field’).
‘C-c C-f f’
‘C-c C-f C-f’
Move to ‘Fcc:’ header field (‘mh-to-field’).
‘C-c C-f l’
‘C-c C-f C-l’
Move to ‘Mail-Followup-To:’ header field (‘mh-to-field’).
‘C-c C-f m’
‘C-c C-f C-m’
Move to ‘From:’ header field (‘mh-to-field’).
‘C-c C-f r’
‘C-c C-f C-r’
Move to ‘Reply-To:’ header field (‘mh-to-field’).
‘C-c C-f s’
‘C-c C-f C-s’
Move to ‘Subject:’ header field (‘mh-to-field’).
‘C-c C-f t’
‘C-c C-f C-t’
Move to ‘To:’ header field (‘mh-to-field’).
Another few commands are available in the MH-Folder buffer resulting
from a search.
‘<TAB>’
Jump to the next folder marker (‘mh-index-next-folder’).
‘S-<TAB>’
Jump to the previous folder marker (‘mh-index-previous-folder’).
‘v’
Visit original folder from where the message at point was found
(‘mh-index-visit-folder’).
There is one option from the ‘mh-search’ customization group used in
searching.
‘mh-search-program’
Search program that MH-E shall use (default: ‘Auto-detect’).
The following hook is available.
‘mh-search-mode-hook’
Hook run upon entry to ‘mh-search-mode’ (default: ‘nil’).
The following face is available.
‘mh-search-folder’
Folder heading face in MH-Folder buffers created by searches.
The command ‘F s’ (‘mh-search-folder’) helps you find messages in
your entire corpus of mail. You can search for messages to or from a
particular person or about a particular subject. In fact, you can also
search for messages containing selected strings in any arbitrary header
field or any string found within the messages.
Out of the box, MH-E uses ‘pick’ to find messages. With a little
extra effort, you can set an indexing program which rewards you with
extremely quick results. The drawback is that sometimes the index does
not contain the words you’re looking for. You can still use ‘pick’ in
these situations.
You are prompted for the folder to search. This can be ‘all’ to
search all folders. Note that the search works recursively on the
listed folder.
Next, an MH-Search buffer appears where you can enter search
criteria.
From:
To:
Cc:
Date:
Subject:
--------
#
--:** search-pattern All L7 (MH-Search)---------------------------
Type C-c C-c to search messages, C-c C-p to use pick, C-c ? for help
Search window
Edit this template by entering your search criteria in an appropriate
header field that is already there, or create a new field yourself. If
the string you’re looking for could be anywhere in a message, then place
the string underneath the row of dashes.
As an example, let’s say that we want to find messages from Ginnean
about horseback riding in the Kosciusko National Park (Australia) during
January, 1994. Normally we would start with a broad search and narrow
it down if necessary to produce a manageable amount of data, but we’ll
cut to the chase and create a fairly restrictive set of criteria as
follows:
From: ginnean
To:
Cc:
Date: Jan 1994
Subject:
--------
horse
kosciusko
As with MH-Letter mode, MH-Search provides commands like ‘C-c C-f
C-t’ (‘mh-to-field’) to help you fill in the blanks. Editing
Message.
If you find that you do the same thing over and over when editing the
search template, you may wish to bind some shortcuts to keys. This can
be done with the variable ‘mh-search-mode-hook’, which is called when ‘F
s’ is run on a new pattern.
To perform the search, type ‘C-c C-c’ (‘mh-index-do-search’).
Sometimes you’re searching for text that is either not indexed, or
hasn’t been indexed yet. In this case you can override the default
method with the pick method by running the command ‘C-c C-p’
(‘mh-pick-do-search’).
The messages that are found are put in a temporary sub-folder of
‘+mhe-index’ and are displayed in an MH-Folder buffer. This buffer is
special because it displays messages from multiple folders; each set of
messages from a given folder has a heading with the folder name. The
appearance of the heading can be modified by customizing the face
‘mh-search-folder’. You can jump back and forth between the headings
using the commands ‘<TAB>’ (‘mh-index-next-folder’) and ‘S-<TAB>’
(‘mh-index-previous-folder’).
In addition, the command ‘v’ (‘mh-index-visit-folder’) can be used to
visit the folder of the message at point. Initially, only the messages
that matched the search criteria are displayed in the folder. While the
temporary buffer has its own set of message numbers, the actual messages
numbers are shown in the visited folder. Thus, the command ‘v’ is
useful to find the actual message number of an interesting message, or
to view surrounding messages with the command ‘F r’ ‘mh-rescan-folder’.
Folders.
Because this folder is temporary, you’ll probably get in the habit of
killing it when you’re done with ‘F k’ (‘mh-kill-folder’).
Folders.
You can regenerate the results by running ‘F s’ with a prefix
argument.
Note: This command uses an ‘X-MHE-Checksum:’ header field to cache
the MD5 checksum of a message. This means that if an incoming message
already contains an ‘X-MHE-Checksum:’ field, that message might not be
found by this command. The following ‘procmail’ recipe avoids this
problem by renaming the existing header field:
:0 wf
| formail -R "X-MHE-Checksum" "X-Old-MHE-Checksum"
Limits, for an alternative interface to searching.
15.1 Configuring Indexed Searches
=================================
The command ‘F s’ (‘mh-search’) runs the command defined by the option
‘mh-search-program’. The default value is ‘Auto-detect’ which means
that MH-E will automatically choose one of ‘swish++’, ‘swish-e’,
‘mairix’, ‘namazu’, ‘pick’ and ‘grep’ in that order. If, for example,
you have both ‘swish++’ and ‘mairix’ installed and you want to use
‘mairix’, then you can set this option to ‘mairix’.
The following sub-sections describe how to set up the various
indexing programs to use with MH-E.
15.1.1 swish++
--------------
In the examples below, replace ‘/home/user/Mail’ with the path to your
MH directory.
First create the directory ‘/home/user/Mail/.swish++’. Then create
the file ‘/home/user/Mail/.swish++/swish++.conf’ with the following
contents:
IncludeMeta Bcc Cc Comments Content-Description From Keywords
IncludeMeta Newsgroups Resent-To Subject To
IncludeMeta Message-Id References In-Reply-To
IncludeFile Mail *
IndexFile /home/user/Mail/.swish++/swish++.index
Use the following command line to generate the swish index. Run this
daily from cron:
find /home/user/Mail -path /home/user/Mail/mhe-index -prune \
-o -path /home/user/Mail/.swish++ -prune \
-o -name "[0-9]*" -print \
| index -c /home/user/Mail/.swish++/swish++.conf -
This command does not index the folders that hold the results of your
searches in ‘+mhe-index’ since they tend to be ephemeral and the
original messages are indexed anyway.
On some systems (Debian GNU/Linux, for example), use ‘index++’
instead of ‘index’.
15.1.2 swish
------------
In the examples below, replace ‘/home/user/Mail’ with the path to your
MH directory.
First create the directory ‘/home/user/Mail/.swish’. Then create the
file ‘/home/user/Mail/.swish/config’ with the following contents:
DefaultContents TXT*
IndexDir /home/user/Mail
IndexFile /home/user/Mail/.swish/index
IndexName "Mail Index"
IndexDescription "Mail Index"
IndexPointer "http://nowhere"
IndexAdmin "nobody"
#MetaNames automatic
IndexReport 3
FollowSymLinks no
UseStemming no
IgnoreTotalWordCountWhenRanking yes
WordCharacters abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789-
BeginCharacters abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
EndCharacters abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789
IgnoreLimit 50 1000
IndexComments 0
FileRules filename contains \D
FileRules pathname contains /home/user/Mail/.swish
FileRules pathname contains /home/user/Mail/mhe-index
FileRules filename is index
This configuration does not index the folders that hold the results
of your searches in ‘+mhe-index’ since they tend to be ephemeral and the
original messages are indexed anyway.
If there are any directories you would like to ignore, append lines
like the following to ‘config’:
FileRules pathname contains /home/user/Mail/scripts
Use the following command line to generate the swish index. Run this
daily from cron:
swish-e -c /home/user/Mail/.swish/config
15.1.3 mairix
-------------
In the examples below, replace ‘~/Mail’ with the path to your MH
directory.
First create the directory ‘~/Mail/.mairix’. Then create the file
‘~/Mail/.mairix/config’ with the following contents:
base=~/Mail
# List of folders that should be indexed. 3 dots at the end means there
# are subfolders within the folder
mh=archive...:inbox:drafts:news:sent:trash
mformat=mh
database=~/Mail/.mairix/database
Use the following command line to generate the mairix index. Run
this daily from cron:
mairix -f ~/Mail/.mairix/config
15.1.4 namazu
-------------
In the examples below, replace ‘/home/user/Mail’ with the path to your
MH directory.
First create the directory ‘/home/user/Mail/.namazu’. Then create
the file ‘/home/user/Mail/.namazu/mknmzrc’ with the following contents:
package conf; # Don't remove this line!
$ADDRESS = 'user@localhost';
$ALLOW_FILE = "[0-9]*";
$EXCLUDE_PATH = "^/home/user/Mail/(mhe-index|spam)";
This configuration does not index the folders that hold the results
of your searches in ‘+mhe-index’ since they tend to be ephemeral and the
original messages are indexed anyway.
Use the following command line to generate the namazu index. Run
this daily from cron:
mknmz -f /home/user/Mail/.namazu/mknmzrc -O /home/user/Mail/.namazu \
-q /home/user/Mail
15.1.5 pick
-----------
This search method does not require any setup.
Read ‘pick’(1) or the section Finding Messages with pick
(http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/mh/finpic.html) in the MH book to
find out more about how to enter the criteria.
15.1.6 grep
-----------
This search method does not require any setup.
Unlike the other search methods, this method does not use the
MH-Search buffer. Instead, you simply enter a regular expression in the
minibuffer. For help in constructing regular expressions, see your man
page for ‘grep’.
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