Ask HN: What's a good tool for creating a PST/Mbox email search engine

1 pointmeeper161 comment

Gmail might be better than any other system for searching through your email, but it still lacks the precision of a decent search system for your email. Is there a decent package out there that will enable you to upload your PST or Mbox file for searching? I'm trying to avoid culling through hundreds of packages claiming to do this.

Thank You.

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I'm all for splitting a task into more manageable pieces where convenient:

1. readpst will convert your PST into a mbox-compatible structure

2a. there's plenty of tools to search that (e.g. Mozilla Thunderbird)

2b. in the past, I've used "readpst -M" to just generate a set of files, and then "grep -HIrn" to search for a string, no further tools needed; you may want to look at more sophisticated approaches.

This has the advantage that all processing is local, and you're not exposing your data to some hopefully-benevolent cloud entity.

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