New on the Zend Developer Zone is this new tutorial about combining the Sphinx and the Zend Framework to search and index email messages from a remote mailbox. He'll also compare it to the Zend Framwork Lucene indexing tool.

Over the next few pages, I'll run you through what I did and the steps I took to index a large email collection with Sphinx. I'll also try the same thing with another very common text search engine, the Zend Framework's Lucene implementation, in order to compare and contrast the differences between the two approaches.

The tutorial shows how to install the PEAR packages needed to access the mailbox, includes a quick look at installing Sphinx and the code to create the searchable index (and perform a search) for each tool. Screenshots are included so you can see the desired results.