Tool

MarkMail is a community-focused searchable message archive developed and hosted by MarkLogic. It provides end users with powerful search and discovery tools for finding answers and understanding activity in popular mailing lists, such as those used by open source projects.

MarkMail is powered by MarkLogic Server, an Enterprise NoSQL database, built to load, query, manipulate, and render large amounts of data. In MarkMail every email is represented and held as an XML document. All the text searches, faceted navigation, analytic queries and HTML page renderings you see are performed by a small MarkLogic Server cluster against millions of XML documents. You candownload a free copy of MarkLogic Server, if you’re interested in checking it out.

So why should you use MarkMail instead of Google or another search engine? Here are a few benefits:

• Scope. Many of the emails we host aren’t in Google’s index. Or at least they weren’t in Google’s index before we went online. But even now with Google and the rest spidering us you’ll still want to use MarkMail because…
• Speciality. Search engines only index public email if it appears on an HTML page somewhere. Google doesn’t know why the words are on the page – doesn’t know the sender, the date, the subject, what’s in the body of the attachments, and so on. We do. So if you want to search for an issue with Apache James involving respooling, with MarkMail you type list:james respool. And hey, if you remember the email you want came from your friend James you type list:james from:james respool and you’re there. You can be very specific because MarkMail is a site built specifically for email.
• Structure. We know about the structure of email. This lets us exclude searching those annoying “copyright notice” footers at the bottom of emails, add relevance weight to the important message headers, reduce the importance of quoted message text, or let you exclude quoted message text if you’d prefer (see the opt:noquote feature). We even understand the structure inside attachment files.
• Analytics. Where else have you seen a chart showing the historical activity corresponding to any arbitrary query you type in? It’s a ton of fun to watch activity trends for lists, people, and keywords, or any mix of the three. Don’t forget to use a minus sign to negate a query: javaone -from:sun.com.

… and more. If you’re interested in learning more about MarkMail’s benefits, visit their FAQ page.