Search is IMO the hard part. I know you can do Lucerne, but getting that working well with email is hard. Until recently Outlook's search was crap compared to gmail. too, and mutt is still essentially "headers only".
Still, shouldn't be that hard to do as long as it is your own server and you trust it; I imagine a lot of the difficulty of gmail is scaling, and even a single user with 20-50GB of mail isn't in the same league.
If you were to outsource it to a service provider:
I'd love a way to do privacy-protecting search on my mailbox, either by building/maintaining a local index, or even more amazingly, some kind of cryptographic/data structure magic: do processing once either pre-encryption or on the local device, then add it to an index, with a configurable slider for data leakage vs. search quality. Search could execute locally and remotely.
(This is to allow you to use webmail with no local persistent storage, or a new phone, to search your email on a server, without trusting the server).
Agreed. I've handled over 100,000 messages with it with no problem, and I know people that have handled well over that. Instant full-text search, no matter how much mail you throw at it.
How about a good old desktop mail client? I don't really understand why so many people insist on only using webmail and then complain about the lack of certain features and/or GMail lock-in.
Mutt is more like "everything I can come up with from the command line." Sure, I won't make my grandma use it, but I've never needed any searching capability beyond grep and co.
Not necessarily. Try to do something like write up your email in Markdown, and create a script to automatically convert it to multipart/alternative with text and html versions. So far as I can tell the only 'real' way is to insert the script between mutt and the sendmail command, but that's less than optimal.
I download my email to the Mac mail app. That has let me find some emails that were unfindable on the web interface (even when I searched by sender email!)
Still, shouldn't be that hard to do as long as it is your own server and you trust it; I imagine a lot of the difficulty of gmail is scaling, and even a single user with 20-50GB of mail isn't in the same league.
If you were to outsource it to a service provider:
I'd love a way to do privacy-protecting search on my mailbox, either by building/maintaining a local index, or even more amazingly, some kind of cryptographic/data structure magic: do processing once either pre-encryption or on the local device, then add it to an index, with a configurable slider for data leakage vs. search quality. Search could execute locally and remotely.
(This is to allow you to use webmail with no local persistent storage, or a new phone, to search your email on a server, without trusting the server).