How can I efficiently search the bitcoin-dev mailing list for discussion of a specific term?

Question

How can I efficiently search the bitcoin-dev mailing list for discussion on a specific term e.g. deprecating BIP37 support?

This question was asked by pinheadmz on IRC.

Answer 1

The simplest way to do this is use a search engine e.g. Google, DuckDuckGo and enter:

"bip37 site:lists.linuxfoundation.org"

This is also useful for searching GitHub issues, pull requests as a Google search is often more effective than the github.com search functionality.

Alternatively you can go to https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/ and download all the gzip mboxes (the URL scheme is simple, so you write a shell one-liner with curl), ungzip them, cat them together, and then use mutt -f combined.mbox.

 url="https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/"
 for file in $(curl $url | grep -Eo \\d{4}-\\w+\\.txt\\.gz); do 
 wget "$url$file"
 done
 gzip *.gz
 cat *.txt > combined.mbox
 mutt -f combined.mbox

This question was answered by various individuals on IRC. Thanks to the individual who provided the above shell script.

May 2023 update

There is now a Bitcoin technical search site https://bitcoinsearch.xyz/ (maintained by Chaincode Labs) where you can search commonly used technical resources (bitcoin-dev, lightning-dev mailing list, Bitcoin Talk, Bitcoin StackExchange, btctranscripts.com, Bitcoin Optech etc) by author (e.g. "Andrew Chow") and/or keyword (e.g. "Adaptor signatures").