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Re: Finding messages from one person replied to by another?



On 18 Jan 2009 12:50 -0500, by ptilopteri@xxxxxxxxx (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:someone@xxxxxxx t:somebody@xxxxxxx/metoo@xxxxxxx \
>    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. somebody@xxxxxxxxxxx is an active poster, and
another@xxxxxxxxxxx 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.

-- 
Michael Kjörling .. michael@xxxxxxxxxxx .. http://michael.kjorling.se
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