Woodpecker is a search system for email, using Xapian to index and search/display emails from Unix mbox files.

A long, long, long time ago (1984) there was a search system called Muscat, built out of work by Dr Martin Porter. My understanding was that he used that to build an email search system he called 'woodpecker'.

Merely a long, long time ago (late 1990s), the successor to Muscat was a system called OpenMuscat, and later Omsee; if I remember correctly someone, possibly Martin, wrote a script called 'woodpecker2' using Omsee.

Omsee was released under GPL, and forked to become Xapian, and was separately developed under a commercial license through a variety of companies and is now possibly owned by Smartlogic where it may form the basis for some of their current products.

A bit before the fork (which was only a long time ago, in 2001) I started work on something called Woodpecker 3, intended to be an email search system built on the GPL codebase. Laziness resulted in this ending up being called 'woodpecker' again once I actually got it vaguely working.

• written for python2 and, despite the commits being from 2008 is not idiomatic python2 (IIRC much of the original code dates from before 2000, so it's really python1 era)

• will probably dislike UTF-8 in some cases

• contains some hardcoded things: my email address, layout of some of my files from whatever machine I was using in 2008

That said, it probably wouldn't be much work to update it to py3, probably rebuild the mail parsing code, and package up for us. Having said that, many people may find Recoll more useful.

James Aylett