mu/www/cheatsheet.org

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#+title: Mu Cheatsheet

* Mu Cheatsheet

  Here are some tips for using =mu=. If you want to know more, please refer to the
 =mu= man pages. For a quick warm-up, there's the =mu-easy= man-page.

** Indexing your mail

  You can index your mail with:
#+begin_src sh
   $ mu index
#+end_src

  If =mu= did not guess the right Maildir, you can set it explicitly:
#+begin_src sh
   $ mu index --maildir=~/MyMaildir
#+end_src

*** Excluding directories from indexing  
  If you want to exclude certain directories from being indexed (for example,
  directories with spam-messages), put a file called =.noindex= in the directory
  to exlude, and it will be ignored when indexing (including its children)
  

** Finding messages

   After you have indexed your messages, you can search them. Here are some
   examples.

*** messages about Helsinki (in message body, subject, sender, ...)

#+begin_src sh
   $ mu find Helsinki
#+end_src

*** messages to Jack with subject jellyfish containing the word tumbleweed

#+begin_src sh
   $ mu find to:Jack subject:jellyfish tumbleweed
#+end_src

*** messages between 2 kilobytes and a 2Mb, written in December 2009 with an attachment from Bill

#+begin_src sh
   $ mu find size:2k..2m date:20091201..20093112 flag:attach from:bill
#+end_src
 
*** unread messages about soccer or socrates or ...

#+begin_src sh
   $ mu find 'subject:soc*' flag:unread
#+end_src
    


** Find contacts
   
   Contacts (names + email addresses) are cached separately, and can be
   searched with =mu cfind= (after your messages have been indexed):

*** all contacts with 'john' in either name or e-mail address   
#+begin_src sh
   $ mu cfind john
#+end_src
    
 =mu cfind= takes a regular expression for matching.
   
    You can export the contact information to a number of formats for use in
    e-mail clients. For examples:

*** export /all/ your contacts to the =mutt= addressbook format

#+begin_src sh
   $ mu cfind --format=mutt-alias
#+end_src

    Other formats are: =plain=, =mutt-ab=, =wl= (Wanderlust), =org-contact=,
 =bbdb= and =csv= (comma-separated values).
 

** Retrieving attachments from messages
   
   You can retrieve attachments from messages using =mu extract=, which takes a
   message file as an argument. Without any other arguments, it displays the
   MIME-parts of the message. You can then get specific attachments:

#+begin_src sh
   $ mu extract --parts=3,4 my-msg-file
#+end_src

   will get you parts 3 and 4. You can also extract files based on their name:

#+begin_src sh
   $ mu extract my-msg-file '.*\.jpg'
#+end_src

   The second argument is a case-insensitive regular expression, and the
   command will extract any files matching the pattern -- in the example, all
 =.jpg=-files. 

   Do not confuse the '.*' regular expression in =mu extract= (and =mu cfind=
   with the '*' wildcard in =mu find=.


** Further processing of matched messages

  If you need to process the results of your queries with some other program,
  you can return the results as a list of absolute paths to the messages found:

  For example, to get the number of lines in all your messages mentioning
 /banana/, you could use something like:

#+begin_src sh
   $ mu find --fields="'l'" banana | xargs wc -l
#+end_src

  Note that we use ='l'=, so the returned message paths will be quoted. This is
  useful if you have maildirs with spaces in their names.
    
  For further processing, also the ~--format=(xml|json|sexp)~ may be
  interesting.
   
** Integration with mail clients

  The =mu-find= man page contains examples for =mutt= and =wanderlust=.

#+html:<hr/><div align="center">&copy; 2011 Dirk-Jan C. Binnema</div>
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