A tool to search for messages in your Thunderbird emails, including GPG encrypted ones.
Thunderbird does not support search in encrypted emails: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=188988
This script is an attempt to allow search anyway by:
- fetching all messages from Thunderbird's database.
- decrypting messages on the fly using GPG tools.
- displaying messages that match the query.
There are reasons why this is a bad idea and you should not use this script:
- all messages will be decrypted and stored in-memory which could potentially mean they end up written to disk in a cache somewhere.
- this method is very inefficient as every message in the database is searched and decrypted.
- Using the original sqlite file could corrupt it (don't think it will but still).
- In its current state this is just a quick hack for my own purpose.
- It only supports Thunderbird.
- It can only do simple searches (currently it does case insensitive must-match-all search).
- It is assumed the global-messages-db.sqlite is in the root directory of this script. It should be able to be more clever to find where the original Thunderbird database file is.
- It should be packaged up as a ruby gem with an executable.
- git clone the project
- copy your global-messages-db.sqlite to the project root (mine for example lives at ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/a6vm5p5t.default/global-messages-db.sqlite)
Assuming you have ruby installed with the bundler gem:
- cd to project root
- run
bundle exec ./bin/search-encrypted-email search "terms go" here - messages will be printed on stdout that have all words (search, "terms go" and here)
- search is case insensitive
Use of this script is at your own risk.
Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/tomtt/search-encrypted-email.