gtkgrepmail - a gtk front end to grepmail

  gtkgrepmail

A gtk front end to grepmail which will allow you a GUI interface to search through your sent and saved mail. Support is provided for both local mailboxes and remote mailboxes that are accessible using IMAP and ssh/rsh.

Preferences are set by clicking the Settings menu and selecting Preferences. The options set out there are as follows:

Path (local or remote) to mail folders

Here you must specify the full path to the directory that contains your mail folders. These must be in standard UNIX mailbox format, but may be compressed by gzip, tzip or bzip2 if those utilities are present on the same system. You do not need to prepend a hostname to the path here, this will automatically be assumed if a host other than CWlocalhost is specified below.

IMAP root

The location of the root of your IMAP folder tree, if applicable. Normally this will be either the same as, or a subset of, the path to your mail folders set above.

Relative path to temporary mailbox

gtkgrepmail stores your search results in a temporary mailbox. Use the default (search-results) unless you have some particular reason to choose differently. Do not prepend a path. Do not use spaces in the filename.

Path (local or remote) to grepmail

Here you must specify the full path to grepmail, on whichever system contains your mailboxes. You do not need to prepend a hostname to the path here, this will automatically be assumed if a host other than CWlocalhost is specified below.

Path to IMAP or mailbox browser

If your mailboxes are on the local computer, you can specify any program (even a text editor such as vi) that can read the mailboxes. The default is "CW/usr/bin/X11/xterm -e /usr/bin/elm -f". If your mailboxes are on a remote computer, specify a program that can accept an IMAP URI such as CWIMAP://servername/path/to/mailbox. One such program is Netscape Navigator.

Path to ssh or rsh

If you intend to access remote mailboxes, gtkgrepmail calls grepmail on the remote computer using ssh (recommended) or rsh. It is important to note that gtkgrepmail requires that you can log into the remote computer interactively entering a password. It is recommended that you achieve this through the use of the ssh-agent(1) facility.

Host

If you intend to access your mailboxes on your local computer, leave this set as "CWlocalhost". Otherwise, enter a name by which your remote computer can be reached.

User

If accessing your mailboxes remotely, enter your username here. This is used both for rsh/ssh and for IMAP.

The main window of the gtkgrepmail application has three tabbed panes:

Search for

Type the expression you wish to search for in the first textbox field. In the second field you may type another expression which you wish to combine with the first in order to return results which only match both expressions (toggle the and radio button) or which match either expression (toggle the or radio button). If you wish to ensure that a certain expression does not exist in the search results, enter that expression in the third field. In all three cases, you may choose to restrict your search on that expression to the body or the header of emails by untoggling the Header or Body checkboxes respectively.

Search in

Here will be listed all of the mailboxes that are available for you to search. Select one or more mailboxes by clicking them. Press Refresh if the available mailboxes have changed since the list was drawn. Press Save to save the currently selected mailboxes as your defaults.

Search options

Here you can restrict your search by date: click the Between radio button if you wish to search for emails between two dates, or click the Expression radio button and describe the period in which you are interested. You can use expressions such as today, yesterday, 5 days ago, 5 weeks ago, before July 2001, 12/10/00 and so on: for complete details see Date::Manip(3pm). As for the other options found on this pane, Case insensitive should be self-explanatory, Inverse match will find emails that do not match your first two search expressions. The state of the and/or toggle will not make any difference in this case; if apple and pear are your first two expressions, the results will be all emails that contain neither of those terms. The Skip non-text attachments option will ignore MIME attachments to your emails that are not in a plain text format (this is generally a good idea when searching for short words).

Buttons

The buttons at the bottom of the main window control the main functions of the program. Clear will reset the data in all three tabs of the form to their default values. Search will commence the search that you have specified. View will launch your IMAP or mailbox browser so that you can see the search results.

Jeremy Malcolm <Jeremy@Malcolm.id.au>

grepmail(1), grep(1), perl(1), ssh(1), ssh-agent(3), rsh(1), Date::Manip(3pm)

Does not offer complete feature-compatibility with grepmail. For example by clicking Header and Body checkboxes you are specifying that you want the text to appear either in the header or body, not that you want it to appear in both. There is no way of specifying that.

Has no provision to prompt you for your SSH password or to save or cache that password. The latter might be construed as as a feature, rather than a bug.

The application will appear to hang while a search is in progress. How noticeable that is will depend on how large your mailboxes are and how busy your network connection is (if applicable).

The status bar does not update before a search is made or a directory listing is compiled.

The Inverse match option does not do what you might expect. The state of the and/or radio buttons is ignored and the contents of the Not field remains uninverted. At the moment, I am disinclined fix this bug, as it would only make the meaning of Inverse match more confusing than it already is.