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Maildir-indexing for full-text search

notmuch provides a full-text index of maildirs, and can easily be used from within mutt. The tool itself is available from https://notmuchmail.org/ (also packaged as notmuch in most major distros). You'll also need notmuch-mutt (which is also packaged in most major distros, as notmuch-mutt).

To start using it, first run notmuch setup.

I use the following cronjobs to generate the index

# Update mail index every 15 minutes
*/15 * * * *              notmuch new &> /dev/null
# Remove old search results every morning
11 5 * * *                rm -rf "/home/zerodogg/.cache/notmuch/mutt/results"

And the following code in your muttrc, where F7 will do a search and display the results, and F8 will reconstruct a thread from metadata.

macro index <F7> \                                                                                                                                                        
      "<enter-command>unset wait_key<enter><shell-escape>notmuch-mutt --prompt search<enter><change-folder-readonly>`echo ${XDG_CACHE_HOME:-$HOME/.cache}/notmuch/mutt/results`<enter>" \                                                                                                                                                           
      "notmuch: search mail"                                                                                                                                              
macro index <F8> \                                                                                                                                                        
      "<enter-command>unset wait_key<enter><pipe-message>notmuch-mutt thread<enter><change-folder-readonly>`echo ${XDG_CACHE_HOME:-$HOME/.cache}/notmuch/mutt/results`<enter><enter-command>set wait_key<enter>" \                                                                                                                                  
      "notmuch: reconstruct thread"