The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/MadEmperorYuri on 2024-10-09 22:45:50.
I have an email account with 30,000 emails. A huge quantity of it is spam. There is a huge diversity of senders, and many of them are companies from which other emails are not spam.
I'm looking for a workflow where I can search fast. I want a dedicated search interface that expects to be reused immediately (nothing modal or popup). I want to hit return and have the first screen-full of results within 4 seconds at most, and further screen-fulls cached and waiting for instant display. The emails are locally available on SSD and I have 64G RAM, so hardware is not the bottleneck.
I need to search by full email address, by domain name, by subject line, and by raw content (both text and HTML). I need to do it all with text patterns, ideally regular expressions.
I want search criteria to be remembered until I change them. I'd love to have a chronological history of previous searches I've made.
I need to select emails from among search results to mark for deletion in some way (e.g. apply a label, move to a folder). If there are multiple pages of results, I need the selection on one page not to disappear when I go to another page to select there as well. Once marked for deletion, I need for those emails to no longer appear in future searches, preferably by using remembered search criteria.
Once I've got everything marked, I need to tell a remote server by IMAP to delete the messages on its end.
Does anyone know if something already exists that does any of these things? I wouldn't be surprised if a normal email client just doesn't exist for this, since those are for everyday use cases. Are there tools for playing with email in bulk like this? Maybe ones used by data scientists or archivists? A shiny set of scripts?
I'll break out Python if I really have to, and probably have a blast with it. But really I just want to get this done.