Search mail from people with different addresses and incorrectly configured clients

Search mail from people with different addresses and incorrectly configured clients

[Sebastian Fischmeister]

Hi,

Sometimes, people's mail clients are configured incorrectly and do not
show the sender name. Often the same person uses different email
addresses. Sometimes they use different names for their alternate email
addresses.

When I search for an email originated from a specific person, I want the
search to cover all messages that match the different criteria mentioned
above.

Has anyone found a good way to use tags to aggregate emails from the
same person? Will it have some disadvantages? It sounds straightforward,
but the management of this would be quite an effort.

The alternative is to create long search strings that encompass all
email addresses of the person. This has less management effort, but I
would need to somewhere store all email addresses associated with a person.

  Sebastian

Re: Search mail from people with different addresses and incorrectly configured clients

[David Bremner]

Sebastian Fischmeister <sfischme@uwaterloo.ca> writes:

>
> Has anyone found a good way to use tags to aggregate emails from the
> same person? Will it have some disadvantages? It sounds straightforward,
> but the management of this would be quite an effort.
>
> The alternative is to create long search strings that encompass all
> email addresses of the person. This has less management effort, but I
> would need to somewhere store all email addresses associated with a person.

It sounds like some variation on named queries [1] might help.  It would
still be a manual process to set up the aliases, but at least once it
was done, it would work everywhere (e.g. command line, emacs client,
python bindings).  These would be prefixed with query:, so to search for
you I'd use query:seb. I was thinking a little about having aliases for
the other prefixes (in particular "to:", and "from:" since to:me and
from:me are common requests). There would be some potential
performance impact because the extra database lookup to expand the
alias, and also some potential confusion. If I make an alias for to:bob,
what if I actually want to search for the term bob? I guess we could
invent some syntax to prevent alias expansion, but I'm not sure what's
possible with current Xapian.


[1]: id:1459015043-8460-1-git-send-email-david@tethera.net