I've done that when searching in-app has failed me, grepping through the mail store on a zimbra instance. Only useful for plain mail though, unless you are scan

I've done that when searching in-app has failed me, grepping through the mail store on a zimbra instance. Only useful for plain mail though, unless you are scanning headers not bodies. One day I might write a script to harvest IMAP accounts into a database (unpacking encodings on the way into the DB, and sitting a few other transforms & derivations where relevant like finding the local "received for" information and putting it in an efficiently searchable column, so things are easily located) so I can just SQL the crap out of it. Doing the same to a filesystem structure designed for easy getting might work if you'd prefer that.