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welcome to muFor many people, e-mail is the 'flow' in their work-flow. One spends a lot of time searching for old e-mails, digging 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. The main requirement is that you store your e-mails in Maildirs. If you have no idea what 'Maildirs' are, you are probably not using them. how does it work?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 indexIt 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 when new mails have arrived. After building the database, it's easy to search for messages. For example:
Searches are case-insensitive as well as 'accent insensitive' (version 0.9 and up); so angStroM will match Ångström. Often-used queries can be stored in bookmarks file. The way to express the searches may be a bit cryptic at first, but easy to learn (in the author's biased opinion); the mu manpages discuss syntax and usage. There is also the mu-easy man-page which contains a lot of simple examples to get you going. NOTE: while searching from the command-line is useful, mu can also easily be integrated with some e-mail clients. The documentation includes examples for integration with mutt and Wanderlust. mu is Free Software (GPLv3), runs on Unix/Linux-based systems, and uses the Xapian text indexing engine. Important: for mu to work, your mails must be stored in a set of maildirs mugStarting with version 0.9, there is now a simple UI called mug. It started as a little experiment, but it seems to be useful enough to include. Usage should be straigthforward.The longer-term goal is to have a bit more complete graphical user-interface; for the time being, mug seems to work fine. If you have defined bookmarks, mug will show them in the toolbar on the left side of the mug-window, as can be seen in the screenshot. news
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download and licenseYou can download mu releases from their download page (Google Code). mu is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 3 or later.
developmentThe mu source code is available in Gitorious; get it from there:$ git clone git://gitorious.org/mu/mu-ng.gitThis is the source code for future versions of mu; there are tags for released versions. If you're not planning on getting involved in the development of mu, it is recommended you use the actual releases. The git version, in particular the 'master' branch, may break at times. There is now also a mailing list available. building and dependenciesmu uses GMime 2.4 and Xapian; you'll need to have those installed to build mu. On Debian/Ubuntu, the following should get you all you need:# apt-get install libxapian-dev libgmime-2.4-dev(obviously, you also need the normal build tools; gcc/g++, make and friends). mu uses autotools, so building follows the normal ./configure/make pattern. This should work without any problems at least on recent Debian/Ubuntu, for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. If it does not work for your distribution, please file a bug with all the error messages, relevant information about your system etc. that you got. contactIf you think you have found a bug, or you have a good idea for a feature, please put them in the issue list (Google Code).mu was designed and implemented by me, Dirk-Jan C. Binnema, as a hobby project for my copious free time. It has no relation to my employer. You can send e-mail to djcb-at-djcbsoftware-dot-nl. |