
Ask HN: What's a good tool for creating a PST/Mbox email search engine - meeper16
Gmail might be better than any other system for searching through your email, but it still lacks the precision of a decent search system for your email. Is there a decent package out there that will enable you to upload your PST or Mbox file for searching? I&#x27;m trying to avoid culling through hundreds of packages claiming to do this.<p>Thank You.
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Piskvorrr
I'm all for splitting a task into more manageable pieces where convenient:

1\. readpst will convert your PST into a mbox-compatible structure

2a. there's plenty of tools to search _that_ (e.g. Mozilla Thunderbird)

2b. in the past, I've used "readpst -M" to just generate a set of files, and
then "grep -HIrn" to search for a string, no further tools needed; you may
want to look at more sophisticated approaches.

This has the advantage that all processing is local, and you're not exposing
your data to some hopefully-benevolent cloud entity.

