Searching Your Mail

Searching your mail

TODO: The following documentation on searching with Xapian was copied from the NewUserGuide. It should be enhanced and completed by somebody who knows.

Press 'L' to do a quick label search. You'll be prompted for a label; hit enter to bring up scrollable list of all the labels you've ever used, along with some special labels (Draft, Starred, Sent, Spam, etc.). Highlight a label and press enter to view all the messages with that label.

What you just did was actually a specific search. For a general search, press '\' (backslash---forward slash is used for in-buffer search, following console conventions). Now type in your query (again, Ctrl-G to cancel at any point.) You can just type in arbitrary text, which will be matched on a per-word basis against the bodies of all email in the index, or you can make use of the full Xapian query syntax (http://xapian.org/docs/queryparser.html):

Phrasal queries using double-quotes, e.g.: "three contiguous words"

Queries against a particular field using <field name>:<query>, e.g.: label:ruby-talk, or from:[email protected]. (Fields include: body, from, to, and subject.)

Search for all emails with attachments using has:attachment (mails with attachments automatically get labelled with the label "attachment"). Specific filetypes can be search for using has:attachment filetype:pdf. You can also specify filenames using filename:somefile.txt. Spaces in filenames require parentheses around the filename filename:(some file with spaces.txt).

Wildcards are allowed in most searches: subject:*viagra*, from:william*

Force non-occurrence by -, e.g.: -body:"hot soup".

If you have the chronic gem installed, date queries like before:today, on:today, after:yesterday, after:(2 days ago), during:february (parentheses required for multi-word descriptions).

You can combine those all together. For example: label:ruby-talk subject:[ANN] -rails on:today

By default, query terms are combined with AND, i.e. all conditions must be true. The example above is equivalent to: label:ruby-talk AND subject:[ANN] AND -rails AND on:today

Exception: Query terms within the same field type are combined as OR. subject:apples subject:oranges will finds apples as well as oranges, it is equivalent to subject:apples OR subject:oranges

You can make this explicit by using conjunctions like "AND", "OR", "NOT". Have a look at the [Xapian QueryParser documentation] for more information.

is:spam is translated into label:Spam, likewise for some other shortcut queries ("in", "has"). Note that it will be OR'd with other label: queries!

msgid:[email protected] is useful if you have a unique identifier for an email.

Play around with the search, and see the [Xapian documentation] for details on more sophisticated queries (date ranges, "within n words", etc.).

For a complete description of all search keywords, check lib/sup/index.rb, in particular, search for PREFIX.