mboxShell

Search queries that mean what you wrote

• OR now has a precedence. It used to be a flag on the whole query, so a single OR anywhere turned every term into an alternative: from:alice OR from:bob subject:invoice did not mean "either sender, about invoices" — it returned everything from alice, everything from bob and everything whose subject said invoice, whoever sent it. On a 6,787-message mailbox that is the difference between 49 hits and 2,102. A query is now a list of AND-ed groups, each group a list of OR-ed terms, and OR is what puts two terms in the same group: a OR b c reads as (a OR b) AND c. There are still no parentheses.
• after:X before:Y was impossible to express. The query held a single date filter, so the second one silently replaced the first and only before: survived — half of what you typed was dropped without a word. Date and size filters now accumulate, which also turns size:>1mb size:<5mb into a real band.
• after: now includes its own day and before: still excludes its own, so after:2024-01-01 before:2025-01-01 is exactly the year 2024 — the half-open reading Gmail's operators use, and consistent with date:A..B, which was already inclusive. Both manuals and both READMEs document the precedence rule and the date bounds. 23 new tests (234 in total).

The other half of a Google Takeout archive

• Google Groups mailboxes now open like any other. A Takeout archive holds two kinds of mbox, not one: besides the Gmail export, every group the account owns comes out as Groups/googlegroups.com/<group>@googlegroups.com/topics.mbox, with folder and file names translated into the account's language. In the archive this was built against, that was the largest file of the whole export: 636 MB and 6,787 messages, against 292 MB for the Gmail mbox.
• The From envelope date of a Groups message no longer resolves to an invented date. Google Groups writes the timezone offset before the year (Thu Apr 16 09:53:04 +0000 2015), which asctime does not allow, so a message with no readable Date: header fell through to a last-resort parse that returned a plausible-looking but wrong 2000-09-16 — no error at all, just a broken sort order and broken date filters.
• The group shows up as a virtual label in the sidebar, so the labels panel covers a whole Takeout archive instead of just its Gmail half. And the mailbox is no longer listed as topics: it takes the name of the group (<group>@googlegroups.com), which is what really identifies it.
• Conversations are grouped by Google's real conversation id (X-GM-THRID) when there is one, instead of by subject. On the reference mailbox that went from 1,927 to 1,958 threads, and the largest thread shed 7 messages that never belonged to it.
• Two older bugs are gone: a message with a repeated Message-ID no longer disappears from the threaded view, and the short option -f, claimed at once by --force and by export's --format, now belongs to one option at a time. Worth knowing before you upgrade: the index format changes, so existing .mboxshell.idx files rebuild themselves the first time you open a mailbox.

Traceable merges, and docs that match the tool

• merge --source-header now records the mailbox name you know. Apple Mail exports a mailbox as a folder "Inbox.mbox" holding a file called literally "mbox", so every message got stamped X-Mbox-Source: mbox — useless for the one thing the header exists for. Mailboxes that would share a name are told apart by their folder.
• The docs described a merge --dedup flag that does not exist: deduplication is on by default and the real flag is --no-dedup. Both READMEs and both manuals are corrected, and --source-header — which shipped undocumented in 0.6.1 — is now covered.
• The merge summary line "Tagged with source" was hardcoded in English while every other line was translated — it now goes through the catalogue too. 7 new tests (202 in total).