Re: How to search a recently read mail

[Eric Abrahamsen]

On Wed, Jul 11 2012, F. Durand wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I've switched to gnus like 3 months ago and I still did not figure out 
> how to quickly search for an old mail I've read some days ago.
>
> I'm in the summary window most of the time and use M-g to refresh it.
> At a moment I need to find a past mail from a keyword.
> Something from
> http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Searching-for-
> Articles.html
> would be perfect, but it only searches into mails displayed in the summary 
> view, i.e. not in already read mail.
>
> I could use /o to first load some old mail, but how many ? If I take not
> enough, I have to add them like 50 by 50. If I take too much, I have to 
> wait some very long seconds to display lots of mail while the article I 
> search may be in the 50 latest read mails.
>
> I could use nnir but I'll have to break my flow by going to the group view,
> then searching my entire mailbox for 30 very long seconds (ewith an indexed 
> mailbox) eventhough I'm interested only in the latest one.
>
> So do you guys know how to do that ? Or am i the only one searching into 
> recently read mail ?

You could consider using mairix for indexing and searching. A query like
"d:5d- bs:keyword" would create a group containing messages from the
past five days with "keyword" in the body or subject header.

Nnmairix allows you to create persistent groups with a certain query. So
I've got a "recent" group where the query is something like "d:4d-"
(plus some exclusion of uninteresting messages). It means I update the
mairix database a couple of times a day, but that goes very quickly.
Then it's "M-g" on the recent group, enter it, and there's everything.
Still trying to keep it from marking messages as read in that group, but
that's another story.

Eric

-- 
GNU Emacs 24.1.50.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.24.10)
 of 2012-07-08 on pellet
Ma Gnus v0.6