E-mail is the 'flow' in the work flow of many people. Consequently, -one spends a lot of time searching for old e-mails, to dig up -some important piece of information. With people having tens of -thousands of e-mails (or more), this is becoming harder and -harder. How to find that one e-mail in an evergrowing haystack? +
For many people, e-mail is the 'flow' in their work-flow. One one spends +a lot of time searching for old e-mails, to dig up some important +piece of information. With people having tens of thousands of e-mails (or +more), this is becoming harder and harder. How to find that one message in the +evergrowing information haystack?
Enter mu. 'mu' is a set of command-line tools for -Linux/Unix that enable you to quickly find the e-mails you are looking -for, assuming that you store your e-mails in Maildirs (e-mail -directories). +Linux/Unix that enable you to quickly find the e-mails you are looking for, +assuming that you store your e-mails in Maildirs (e-mail directories).
First there is mu index which fills a database with -information about all your e-mails; this may take a couple of minutes -the first time you do it, but after that it's a lot faster. - +
First, you need to index your messages. Indexing means filling a +database with information about your e-mails; this may take a couple of +minutes the first time you do it, but after that it's a lot +faster. mu indexes your mail with the index command:
$ mu index-It tries to pick reasonable defaults, but you can of course specify -your own options. You can run mu index periodically to keep -your database up-to-date. +It tries to pick reasonable defaults, but you can specify your own options as +well. You could run mu index periodically to keep your database +up-to-date. Or you could trigger it after new mails has arrived.
After building the database, it's easy to search for messages. For example: