I have confession to make: finding e-mail that somebody sent to me isn't easy. Yes, I don't use GUI e-mail client (in fact, I tried to use Thunderbird, Evolution and various other GUI e-mail clients, but gave up after a while). mutt does everything I need in e-mail. Except powerful searching.
Then, I stumbled upon ZOE. It was dream coming true for me. Mailbox searching (and more) powered by Lucene search engine. But, it came with a price. It needed whole day to index my 500Mb mail archive. After it exhausted 800Mb of disk space (creating additional copy of each mail for it's own use; never mind that original mailboxes where on same disk -- it has support just for IMAP and POP) it become apparent that I needed better solution.
Since ZOE is written in Java, hacking wasn't really a option. So, I began to contemplate perfect mail search (for me at least). For a start, it has to be written in perl. Then, it has to use original mailboxes on disk. It would also be nice if it was usable on my (slow, PIII/600Mhz) laptop.
And, Mail::Box Web Search was born. It's not quite ready for production (yet), but it's approaching 0.9 version really fast (yes, I know link is broken for now. I have problems with python after I downgraded to Debian testing from unstable because of grave mod_perl bug; it will be fixed soon). It uses bunch of perl modules (Mail::Box for reading mails, SWISH::API or Plucene for indexing and many others) and consists of indexer and http server which provide web user interface.