.TH MU-EASY 1 "March 2010" "User Manuals" .SH NAME mu easy \- a quick introduction to mu .SH DESCRIPTION \fBmu\fR is a set of tools for dealing with e-mail messages in Maildirs. There are many options, which are all described in the man pages for the various sub-commands. This man pages jumps over all the details and gives examples of the more common use cases. If the use cases described here do not precisely do what you want, please check the more extensive information in the man page about the sub-command you are using -- for example, the mu-index or mu-find man pages. \fBNOTE\fR: the \fBindex\fR command (and therefore, the ones that depend on that, such as \fBfind\fR), require that you store your mail in the Maildir-format. If you don't do so, you can still use the other commands, but you won't be able to index/search your mail. .SH INDEXING YOUR E-MAIL Before you can search e-mails, you'll first need to index them: .nf \fB$ mu index\fR .fi The process can take a few minutes, depending on the amount of mail you have, the speed of your computer, hard drive etc. Usually, indexing should be able to reach a speed of a few hundred messages per second. \fBmu index\fR guesses the top-level Maildir to do its job; if it guesses wrong, you can use the \fI--maildir\fR option to specify the top-level directory that should be processed. See the \fBmu-index\fR man page for more detail. Normally, \fBmu index\fR visits all the directories under the top-level Maildir; however, you can exclude certain directories (say, the 'trash' or 'spam' folders) by creating a file called \fI.noindex\fR in the directory. When \fBmu\fR sees such a file, it will excluded this directory and its sub-directories. .SH SEARCHING YOUR E-MAIL After you have indexed your mail,you can search it. Normally, the search results are to standard output, but the output can also be in the form of Maildir with symbolic links to the found messages. This enables integration with e-mail clients; see the \fBmu-find\fR man page for details, the syntax of the search parameters and so on. Here, we just give some examples for common cases. First, let's search for all messages sent to Julius Caesar regarding fruit: .nf \fB$ mu find t:julius fruit\fR .fi This should return something like: .nf 2008-07-31T21:57:25 EEST John Milton Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt .fi This means there is a message to 'julius' with 'fruit' somewhere in the message. In this case, it's a message from John Milton. Note that the display of the date depends on your system locale. How do we know that the message was sent to Julius Caesar? Well, it's not visible from the results above, because the default fields that are shown are date/sender/subject. However, we can change this using the \fI--fields\fR parameter (see the \fBmu-find\fR man page for the details): .nf \fB$ mu find --fields="t s" t:julius fruit\fR .fi In other words, display the 'To:'-field (t) and the subject (s). This should return something like: .nf Julius Caesar Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt .fi This is the same message found before, only with some different fields displayed. By default, \fBmu\fR uses the logical AND for the search parameters -- that is, it displays messages that match all the parameters. However, we can use logical OR as well: .nf \fB$ mu find t:julius OR f:socrates\fR .fi In other words, display messages that are either sent to Julius Caesar \fBor\fR are from Socrates. This could return something like: .nf 2008-07-31T21:57:25 EEST Socrates cool stuff 2008-07-31T21:57:25 EEST John Milton Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt .fi What if we want to see some of the body of the message? You can list (parts of) the message contents by using the --summary-len=\fIn\fR option, which will 'summarize' the first \fIn\fR lines of the message: .nf \fB$ mu find --summary-len=4 napoleon m:/archive\fR .fi .nf 1970-01-01T02:00:00 EET Napoleon Bonaparte rock on dude Summary: Le 24 février 1815, la vigie de Notre-Dame de la Garde signala le trois-mâts le Pharaon, venant de Smyrne, Trieste et Naples. Comme d'habitude, un pilote côtier partit aussitôt du port, rasa le château .fi The summary consists of the first n lines of the message with all superfluous whitespace removed. Also note the \fBm:/archive\fR parameter in the query. This means that we only match messages in a maildir called '/archive'. .SH MORE QUERIES Let's list a few more queries that may be interesting; please note that searches for message flags, priority and date ranges are only available in mu version 0.9 or later. Get all important messages which are signed: .nf \fB$ mu find flag:signed prio:high \fR .fi Get all messages from Jim without an attachment: .nf \fB$ mu find from:jim AND NOT flag:attach\fR .fi Get all unread messages where the subject mentions Ångström: .nf \fB$ mu find flag:unread subject:Ångström\fR .fi which is equivalent to: .nf \fB$ mu find flag:unread subject:angstrom\fR .fi because does mu is case-insensitive and accent-insensitive. Get all unread messages between March 2002 and August 2003 about some bird (or a Swedish rock band): .nf \fB$ mu find date:20020301..20030831 flag:new nightingale\fR .fi Get all message we got today: .nf \fB$ mu find date:today..now\fR .fi Get all message we got in the last two weeks about emacs: .nf \fB$ mu find date:2w..now emacs\fR .fi .SH DISPLAYING MESSAGES We might also want to display complete messages. This can be done using \fBmu view\fR command. Note that this command does not use the database; you simply provide the path to a message. Therefore, if you want to display some message from a search query, you'll need its path. To get the path (think \fBl\fRocation) for our first example we can use: .nf \fB$ mu find --fields="l" t:julius fruit\fR .fi And we'll get someting like: .nf /home/someuser/Maildir/archive/cur/1266188485_0.6850.cthulhu:2, .fi We can now display this message: .nf \fB$ mu view /home/someuser/Maildir/archive/cur/1266188485_0.6850.cthulhu:2,\fR From: John Milton To: Julius Caesar Subject: Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt Date: 2008-07-31T21:57:25 EEST OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, [...] .fi .SH AUTHOR Dirk-Jan C. Binnema .SH "SEE ALSO" mu(1) mu-index(1) mu-cleanup(1) mu-find(1) mu-mkdir(1) mu-view(1) mu-extract(1)