Re: RMAIL, MIME-related bug

[Richard Stallman]

    1. Often there is a need to grep the mail archive for some old message.
    This is impossible if message is encoded in base64/quoted-printable.

It just means it might be useful for the program that searches to know
how to decode attachments.

    2. Sometimes there is a need to make a bookmark to the message to be
    able to quickly return to it later.

That could mean various things--I don't understand why you think it is
so hard.

       Only one way to fetch
    old message is to start MUA and browse through dozens of folders and
    hundreds of messages in every folder.

That is certainly not the only way.  The way I normally do this is
with grep.  It works pretty well, but it could be better.

I think we could use a program designed to search through mail folders
in mbox format.  Such a program could be convenient in many ways.  For
instance, it could have a feature to decode base64 and
quoted-printable encodings.  It could also have the ability to search
for matches against specific header fields, or against the body, and
handle boolean combinations of such criteria.

It should output the messages that meet the specified criterion, and
add to each message something in the form of a header field that says
which file it came from and which line number.  That way another
program could look at the output and find the relevant messages in the
files where they originally came from.

If the output gives you too many messages, you could apply the search
program to the output of the previous run, to filter it further.

It would not be a very big job to write this program by adapting grep.
Would anyone like to try?