Re: Finding messages from one person replied to by another?
* Michael Kjorling <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxx> [20090118 19:24]:
> 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.
>
mairix has an option "-t" which grabs the thread for the message that
your search matches and dumps the whole thread in the destination
folder. I use it all the time when I search mailing lists, such as
LKML (2000-3000 messages per week) or a couple of internal mailing
lists to where I work, that have the type volume that you describe.
So - you know that the message was from person A or person B, to a
specific list, sent in the last two weeks.
$ mairix -t d:2w- f:personA@xxxxxxxx/personB@xxxxxxxx t:list@xxxxxxxxx
If you know a word in the subject or the body, then you can add that
to narrow it down.
You seem to be facing a rare problem - getting too many hits from your
search criteria. Most of the time, I end up running mairix over and
over with increasingly generic searches, broadening the date range,
until I get hits and something in my search folder. It's rare that I
end up with thousands of hits and a folder that becomes a problem
sifting through to find what I'm looking for.
So, I think mairix is your best bet.
--
Anders Rayner-Karlsson <anders@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
All-Round Linux Tinkerer, RHCE and PITA DeLuxe