DragonFly On-Line Manual Pages

MU-EASY(1)             DragonFly General Commands Manual            MU-EASY(1)

NAME
       mu easy - a quick introduction to mu

DESCRIPTION
       mu 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 of the details
       and gives examples of some 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.

       NOTE: the index command (and therefore, the ones that depend on that,
       such as find), 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.

       By default, mu uses colorized output when it thinks your terminal is
       capable of doing so. If you don't like color, you can use the --nocolor
       command-line option, or set the MU_NOCOLOR environment variable to non-
       empty.

INDEXING YOUR E-MAIL
       Before you can search e-mails, you'll first need to index them:

         $ mu index

       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.

       mu index guesses the top-level Maildir to do its job; if it guesses
       wrongly, you can use the --maildir option to specify the top-level
       directory that should be processed. See the mu-index man page for more
       details.

       Normally, mu index 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 .noindex in the directory.
       When mu sees such a file, it will exclude this directory and its sub-
       directories from indexing. Also see .noupdate in the mu-index manpage.

SEARCHING YOUR E-MAIL
       After you have indexed your mail, you can start searching it. By
       default, the search results are printed on standard output.
       Alternatively, the output can take the form of Maildir with symbolic
       links to the found messages. This enables integration with e-mail
       clients; see the mu-find 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:

       $ mu find t:julius fruit

       This should return something like:

         2008-07-31T21:57:25 EEST John Milton <jm@example.com> Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt

       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
       date format depends on your the language/locale you are using.

       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
       --fields parameter (see the mu-find man page for the details):

         $ mu find --fields="t s" t:julius fruit

       In other words, display the 'To:'-field (t) and the subject (s). This
       should return something like:
         Julius Caesar <jc@example.com> Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt

       This is the same message found before, only with some different fields
       displayed.

       By default, mu 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:

         $ mu find t:julius OR f:socrates

       In other words, display messages that are either sent to Julius Caesar
       or are from Socrates. This could return something like:

         2008-07-31T21:57:25 EEST Socrates <soc@example.com> cool stuff
         2008-07-31T21:57:25 EEST John Milton <jm@example.com> Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt

       What if we want to see some of the body of the message?  You can get a
       'summary' of the first lines of the message using the --summary option,
       which will 'summarize' the first n lines of the message:

         $ mu find --summary napoleon m:/archive

         1970-01-01T02:00:00 EET Napoleon Bonaparte <nb@example.com> rock on dude
         Summary: Le 24 fevrier 1815, la vigie de Notre-Dame de la Garde signala le
         trois-mats le Pharaon, venant de Smyrne, Trieste et Naples. Comme
         d'habitude, un pilote cotier partit aussitot du port, rasa le chateau

       The summary consists of the first n lines of the message with all
       superfluous whitespace removed.

       Also note the m:/archive parameter in the query. This means that we
       only match messages in a maildir called '/archive'.

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:
         $ mu find flag:signed prio:high

       Get all messages from Jim without an attachment:
         $ mu find from:jim AND NOT flag:attach

       Get all messages where Jack is in one of the contact fields:
         $ mu find contact:jack
       This uses the special contact: pseudo-field which matches (from, to, cc
       and bcc).

       Get all messages in the Sent Items folder about yoghurt:
        $mu find maildir:'/Sent Items' yoghurt
       Note how we need to quote search terms that include spaces.

       Get all unread messages where the subject mentions Angstrom:
         $ mu find subject:ongstr"m flag:unread
       which is equivalent to:
         $ mu find subject:angstrom flag:unread
       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):
         $ mu find date:20020301..20030831 nightingale flag:unread

       Get all messages received today:
         $ mu find date:today..now

       Get all messages we got in the last two weeks about emacs:
         $ mu find date:2w..now emacs

       Another powerful feature (since 0.9.6) are wildcard searches, where you
       can search for the last n characters in a word. For example, you can
       search for:
         $ mu find 'subject:soc*'
       and get mails about soccer, Socrates, society, and so on. Note, it's
       important to quote the search query, otherwise the shell will interpret
       the '*'.

       You can also search for messages with a certain attachment using their
       filename, for example:

         $ mu find 'file:pic*'
       will get you all messages with an attachment starting with 'pic'.

       If you want to find attachments with a certain MIME-type, you can use
       the following:

       Get all messages with PDF attachments:
         $ mu find mime:application/pdf

       or even:

       Get all messages with image attachments:
         $ mu find 'mime:image/*'

       Note that (1) the '*' wildcard can only be used as the rightmost thing
       in a search query, and (2) that you need to quote the search term,
       because otherwise your shell will interpret the '*' (expanding it to
       all files in the current directory -- probably not what you want).

DISPLAYING MESSAGES
       We might also want to display the complete messages instead of the
       header information. This can be done using mu view command. Note that
       this command does not use the database; you simply provide it 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 location) for our first
       example we can use:

         $ mu find --fields="l" t:julius fruit

       And we'll get someting like:
         /home/someuser/Maildir/archive/cur/1266188485_0.6850.cthulhu:2,
       We can now display this message:

         $ mu view /home/someuser/Maildir/archive/cur/1266188485_0.6850.cthulhu:2,

            From: John Milton <jm@example.com>
            To: Julius Caesar <jc@example.com>
            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,
            [...]

FINDING CONTACTS
       While mu find searches for messages, there is also mu cfind to find
       contacts, that is, names + addresses. Without any search expression, mu
       cfind lists all of your contacts.

         $ mu cfind julius

       will find all contacts with 'julius' in either name or e-mail address.
       Note that mu cfind accepts a regular expression.

       mu cfind also supports a --format=-parameter, which sets the output to
       some specific format, so the results can be imported into another
       program. For example, to export your contact information to a mutt
       address book file, you can use something like:

         $ mu cfind --format=mutt-alias > ~/mutt-aliases

       Then, you can use them in mutt if you add something like source ~/mutt-
       aliases to your muttrc.

AUTHOR
       Dirk-Jan C. Binnema <djcb@djcbsoftware.nl>

SEE ALSO
       mu(1) mu-index(1) mu-find(1) mu-mkdir(1) mu-view(1) mu-extract(1)

User Manuals                     December 2012                      MU-EASY(1)