mu/README.org

1.6 KiB

Welcome to mu!

Given the enormous amounts of e-mail many people gather and the importance of e-mail message in our work-flows, it's essential to quickly deal with all that mail - in particular, to instantly find that one important e-mail you need right now.

mu is a tool for dealing with e-mail messages stored in the Maildir-format. mu's main purpose is to help you to quickly find the messages you need; in addition, it allows you to view messages, extract attachments, create new maildirs, and so on. See the mu cheatsheet for some examples.

Searching works by first indexing your messages into a Xapian-database, which can then be queried using a custom query language.

Built on top of the mu, are some extensions (included in this package):

  • mu-for-emacs (mu4e): a full-featured e-mail client that runs inside emacs
  • mu-guile: bindings for the Guile/Scheme programming language

And, there is a toy GTK+-interface called 'mug' (in the 'toys/' subdir)

Mu is written in C and a bit of C++, with mu4e written in Emacs-Lisp and mu-guile in a mix of C and Scheme.

Note, mu is available in Debian/Ubuntu under the name maildir-utils, apparently because they don't like short name. It's also possible to confuse that name with the GNU Mailutils project (which is totally unrelated) - but now you have been warned.