MySQL Secondary Select Method?

[Brett Randall]

Hi All

The amount of e-mail that I have in gnus is growing increasingly large
(in the gigabytes now), and becoming increasingly hard to index and
search. I by default keep all e-mail, both sent and received, unless
its spam, for archiving purposes.

A few days ago I wondered about the possibility of changing from an
nnml secondary select method in gnus to a mysql one. One table for
each group, or even at worst one table for all, with each row having
RFC-822 compliant headers as the fields, and two extra fields... One
as "extra headers" that are non-RFC-822 compliant (eg X-Attribution,
etc) and one being the "blob" that is the message.

This way if I want to look for all e-mails from one person in a
certain time frame, it's just a

SELECT email_body FROM brett_reference WHERE sender LIKE '%bob jones%'
 AND received_date >= '2004-01-01' AND received_date <='2004-11-01'

or even to search across groups:

SELECT email_body FROM brett_reference, brett_other, brett_misc WHERE
 subject LIKE '%gnus%mysql%'

Even to the point where I can be in another location doing web
searches through my e-mails. Is this idea just way too inconceivable
or is it something that could be done? Me and lisp just aren't good
friends, so is there anyone who knows how this would go about being
put together?

Thanks for any comments! :)
-- 
Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future.
                -- Niels Bohr