I think most geeks get a ton of email. I’ve been rather selective in what lists I join (and what mail I just auto-delete at the server level), so I only get perhaps a couple hundred emails a day now.<\/p>\n
For various ridiculous reasons, searching a mailbox is hard. Most of my mail clients will do it, but sometimes I really want to do it myself because I want to be more exacting. Lately I’ve been tinkering more and more with using IMAP from the command line. Partially it’s that IMAP is really just a little bit unusual and kind of intriguing. But mostly, it’s just that, from time to time, it’s easier for me to just send some manual IMAP commands if I know what I’m doing. (For example, I have absolutely no idea how to subscribe to a particular folder in any of the mail clients I have available. I could wade through the menus and maybe find it, but it’s easier for me to just use Net::IMAP to subscribe to the folder<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Like most implementations, Ruby’s Net::IMAP library provides a search<\/a> method. And, like most implementations, it does a very poor job of documenting what is supported. At the risk of sounding like I’ve lost my mind, I actually found the IMAP RFC (3501)<\/a> to be the easiest bit of documentation to understand. Below are some examples:<\/p>\n You can chain keys, so the following is a valid search command:<\/p>\n But what isn’t abundantly clear is that search terms are combined with a logical AND, so the above will only match mail from Matt with “bacon” in the subject line.<\/p>\n This appears to be the way to get a logical OR instead:<\/p>\n After spending a while trying to get all possible keys for a text search — e.g., (FROM \"foo\") OR (SUBJECT \"foo\") OR (CC \"foo\")...<\/tt> — I realized that there’s an easier way: the TEXT key, which searches headers and the body. So for my generic search method, the search simply became TEXT \"foo\"<\/tt>.<\/p>\n You may also find some of the other keys interesting, like the ability to search for RECENT<\/tt> or FLAGGED<\/tt>. I don’t intend to provide an exhaustive list here, however.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I think most geeks get a ton of email. I’ve been rather selective in what lists I join (and what mail I just auto-delete at the server level), so I only get perhaps a couple hundred emails a day now. … Continue reading FROM \"matt\" SUBJECT \"bacon\"<\/code><\/p>\n(FROM \"matt\") OR (SUBJECT \"bacon\")<\/code><\/p>\n