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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 index
If =mu= did not guess the right Maildir, you can set it explicitly:
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$ 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
examples. Also note the =--threads= argument to get a threaded display of
the messages, and =--color= to get colors (both since 0.9.7).
*** messages about Helsinki (in message body, subject, sender, ...)
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$ mu find Helsinki
*** messages to Jack with subject jellyfish containing the word tumbleweed
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$ mu find to:Jack subject:jellyfish tumbleweed
*** messages between 2 kilobytes and a 2Mb, written in December 2009 with an attachment from Bill
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$ mu find size:2k..2m date:20091201..20093112 flag:attach from:bill
*** signed messages about apples *OR* oranges
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$ mu find flag:signed apples OR oranges
*** messages about yoghurt in the Sent Items folder (note the quoting):
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$ mu find maildir:'/Sent Items' yoghurt
*** unread messages about things starting with 'soc' (soccer, society, socrates, ...)
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$ mu find 'subject:soc*' flag:unread
Note, the '*' only works at the /end/ of a search term, and you need to
quote it or the shell will interpret it before =mu= sees it.
(searching using the '*' wildcard is available since mu 0.9.6)
*** finding messages with images as attachment
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$ mu find 'mime:image/*'
(since mu version 0.9.8)
*** finding messages with 'milk' in one of its text parts (such as text-based attachments):
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$ mu find embed:milk
(since mu version 0.9.8)
*** finding /all/ your messages
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$ mu find ""
(since mu version 0.9.7)
** 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
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$ 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
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$ mu cfind --format=mutt-alias
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:
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$ mu extract --parts=3,4 my-msg-file
will get you parts 3 and 4. You can also extract files based on their name:
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$ 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.
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$ mu find --color capibara
(since =mu= version 0.9.6)
** Integration with mail clients
The =mu-find= man page contains examples for =mutt= and =wanderlust=. And
since version 0.9.8, =mu= includes its own e-mail client for =emacs=, =mu4e=.
** Viewing specific 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:
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$ mu view ~/Maildir/inbox/cur/message24
You can also use =--color= to get colorized output, and =--summary= to get a
summary of the message contents instead of the whole thing.
** 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:
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$ mu find --exec='wc -l'
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|sexp)~ can be useful. For
example,
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$ mu find --format=xml pancake
will give you a list of pancake-related messages in XML-format.
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