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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 also the =mu-easy= man-page.
** Indexing your mail
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$ mu indexIf =mu= did not guess the right Maildir, you can set it explicitly: #+html:
$ mu index --maildir=~/MyMaildir*** 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 example. *** messages about Helsinki (in message body, subject, sender, ...) #+html:
$ mu find Helsinki*** messages to Jack with subject jellyfish containing the word tumbleweed #+html:
$ mu find to:Jack subject:jellyfish tumbleweed*** messages between 2 kilobytes and a 2Mb, written in December 2009 with an attachment from Bill #+html: $ mu find size:2k..2m date:20091201..20093112 flag:attach from:bill *** unread messages about soccer or socrates or ... #+html:
$ mu find 'subject:soc*' flag:unread** Finding 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 #+html:
$ mu cfind john=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 example: *** export /all/ your contacts to the =mutt= addressbook format #+html:
$ mu cfind --format=mutt-aliasOther 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: #+html:
$ mu extract --parts=3,4 my-msg-filewill get you parts 3 and 4. You can also extract files based on their name: #+html:
$ mu extract my-msg-file '.*\.jpg'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=. ** Getting more colorful output Some of the =mu= commands, such as =mu find=, =mu cfind= and =mu view= support colorized output. By default this is turned off, but you can enable it with =--color=, or setting the =MU_COLORS= environment variable to non-empty. #+html:
$ mu find --color capibara(since =mu= version 0.9.6) ** 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: #+html:
$ mu find --fields="'l'" banana | xargs wc -lNote 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)~ can be useful. For example, #+html:
$ mu find --format=xml pancakewill give you a list of pancake-related messages in XML-format. ** Integration with mail clients The =mu-find= man page contains examples for =mutt= and =wanderlust=. ** Viewing messages You can view message contents with =mu view=; it does not use the database and simply takes a message file as it's argument: #+html:
$ mu view ~/Maildir/inbox/cur/message24You can also use =--color= to get colorized output, and =--summary= to get a summary of the message contents instead of the whole thing. #+html: