Slightly OT. Good IMAP search tool?

Sat Feb 20 21:45:03 UTC 2010

On Sat, Feb 20, 2010 at 11:56:19AM -0800, Mike Lyon wrote:
> What are people using these days to suck down an IMAP account, search it and
> then export the search results? Any suggestions.

I'd replied off-list, but then realized that perhaps this would be of
more general interest.  My apologies to Mike for the redundancy.

I use fetchmail and grepmail.  Grepmail emits as its output a Unix mbox
file, so it lends itself quite nicely to going through chunks of saved mail,
matching grep-ish criteria (including headers) and producing a file full
of the messages that match.

Let me also mention formail, which is part of the procmail distribution,
and is also quite useful -- in this particular case, for culling duplicates.
All three of these tools are part of my standard postmaster toolbox.

---Rsk