Funes: a simple program for searching email archives.
   Nelson Minar, <nelson@monkey.org> http://www.nelson.monkey.org/funes/


I have eight years of email archives. These archives are my memory.
But my memory is awkward, it is hard for me to find things in it. When
did I last email my old friend? What all have I thought about Jorge
Luis Borges? Where are all the condolences I got in early April, 2001?

Funes is a program to enable people to search their memories. At its
core is a search engine: Funes indexes all of your email into a
quickly-searchable database and then lets you query that database. The
search engine itself is implemented with Lucene. Funes adds the glue
to parse mailboxes and interact with the user.

There are other search tools out there for email. Two notable ones:
grepmail and mg. I wrote Funes because I wanted my own tool to work my
own way, because I needed something to keep out of trouble while I was
looking for work, and because Lucene was so cool. Mostly, I wrote it
because my memory is important to me.


USAGE
-----

Compile the code
  $ ant
  $ ant test

Build an index
  $ funes index ~/Mail/inbox.mbox

Search the index
  $ funes search Babel
  $ funes search author:nelson@monkey.org
  $ funes search subject:lucene AND NOT author:nelson@monkey.org

For info on the query syntax, see
  http://www.lucene.com/cgi-bin/faq/faqmanager.cgi?file=chapter.search#q5
Field names you can query on are defined in Schema.java:
  "subject", "author", "recipients", "date", "messageID", and "body".


STATUS
------

The Funes project started on August 3, 2001. Funes is very much a work
in progress - this current release (2001-11-02) is only minimally
usable. Major drawbacks include:

  * No control over where index file is placed
  * No install packaging
  * Only body is searched by default
  * Can only index text email
  * Can only index Berkeley mbox format

There are lots of plans - see the file TODO for ideas.


LICENSING
---------

Funes is Copyright (C) 2001, Nelson Minar, all rights reserved.
Funes is licensed to you via GPL, contained in file LICENSE.GPL

Funes incorporates excellent third party free software to get its job
done: thanks to all the authors! Thanks in particular to Doug Cutting,
whose fantastic Lucene search and index library makes Funes possible. A
full list of third party packages and their licenses is in lib/README.

This product includes software developed by the Apache Software
Foundation (http://www.apache.org/).



    "I, myself, alone, have more memories than all mankind since the
    world began," he said to me. And also: "My dreams are like other
    people's waking hours." And again, towards dawn: "My memory, sir, 
    is like a garbage heap."
  
                                                   Jorge Luis Borges
                             reporting on the memory of Ireneo Funes
                                         in Funes el Memorioso, 1944.


