Elastic Search is a powerful open source tool that combines RegEx to perform lookups across numerous data sources.
Thanks to Ashley McNamara, she tweeted her impatience about downloading all her Gmail archive. By the way, this is quite easy. You can do that here as shown below. It make take some time due to the size of the archive!
Asking what it was for she noted she was using it as the source of practice. What a great idea that is. Practice searching on To, From, attachment type, words. Concatenating all that together with a multitude of options like from:cisco attachment:pdf or attachment:xml will allow you practice of Elastic Search. Once you have a strong handle of how Elastic Search, higher applications such as LogStash can be used as a source of data. Or what about your application you write in Golang, Python or Ruby passing requests to Elastic Search to look up bulk data. Woo! The ideas are endless.
Like using a Looking Glass server for BGP to practice RegEx, Elastic Search and your Gmail archive is a superb way to get some skills in looking through you data. You should see some basic lookups and the results against my archive in the near future. Stay tuned.