.TH MU 1 "January 2010" "User Manuals" .SH NAME mu \- index and search the contents of e-mail messages stored in Maildirs .SH SYNOPSIS .B mu [options] [parameter(s)] .SH DESCRIPTION .B mu is a set of tools for indexing and searching e-mail messages stored in Maildirs. It does so by recursively scanning a Maildir directory tree and analyzing the e-mail messages found. The results of this analysis are then stored in a database. Using this database, you can quickly search for specific messages. .B mu also offers functionality for creating maildirs. The various tools are available as commands for a single .B mu executable. .SH GENERAL OPTIONS .B mu offers a number of general options -- options that apply to all commands: .TP \fB\-a\fR, \fB\-\-muhome\fR causes \fBmu\fR to use an alternative directory to store and read its database and logs. By default, \fB~/.mu\fR is used. .TP \fB\-d\fR, \fB\-\-debug\fR makes \fBmu\fR generate extra debug information, useful for debugging the program itself. Note that by default, debug information goes to the log file, \fB~/.mu/mu.log\fR. .TP \fB\-q\fR, \fB\-\-quiet\fR causes \fBmu\fR not to output informational messages to standard output, but only to the log file. Error messages will still be sent to standard error. .TP \fB\-e\fR, \fB\-\-log-stderr\fR causes \fBmu\fR not to output all log messages to standard error, in addition to sending them to the log file. .TP \fB\-v\fR, \fB\-\-version\fR outputs the \fBmu\fR-version and copyright information. .TP \fB\-h\fR, \fB\-\-help\fR list the various command line options, while \fB\-\-help\-index\fR, \fB\-\-help\-find\fR and \fB\-\-help\-all\fR list only the options for one command, or all of the commands. .SH COMMANDS .B mu offers the following commands: .TP \fBindex\fR for indexing (analyzing) the contents of your Maildirs, and storing the information in a database .TP \fBfind\fR for finding messages in your database, using certain search parameters (see below for details). You can use \fBquery\fR and \fBsearch\fR as synonyms for \fBfind\fR. .TP \fBcleanup\fR for removing messages from your database for which there is no corresponding message file anymore. This commonly happens when you delete or move messages. .TP \fBmkdir\fR for creating Maildirs. .SH THE INDEX COMMAND Using the .B index command, you can index your Maildir directories, and store the information in a Xapian database. .B index understands Maildirs as defined by Dan Bernstein for qmail(7). It also understands recursive Maildirs (Maildirs within Maildirs), and the VFAT-version of Maildir, as used by Tinymail/Modest. E-mail messages which are not stored in something that looks like a Maildir leaf directory (\fIcur\fR and \fInew\fR) are ignored. Currently, symlinks are not followed. If there is a file called .B .noindex in a directory, the contents of that directory and any of its subdirectories will be ignored. This can be useful to exclude certain directories from the indexing process, for example directories with spam-messages. The first run of .B mu index may take a few minutes if you have a lot of mail (ten thousands of messages). Fortunately, such a full scan needs to be done only once, after that it suffices to index the changes, which goes much faster. Also note that a substantial amount of the time goes to printing the progress information; if you turn that off (with \fB\-q\fR or \fB\-\-quiet\fR), it goes a lot faster. .SS Indexing options .TP \fB\-m\fR, \fB\-\-maildir\fR=\fI\fR starts searching at\fI\fR. By default, .B mu uses whatever the .B MAILDIR environment variable is set to; if that is not set, it tries .B ~/Maildir \. .TP \fB\-r\fR, \fB\-\-reindex\fR re-index all mails, even ones that are already in the database. .T \fB\-u\fR, \fB\-\-cleanup\fR automatically clean up the database after indexing. This is functionally equivalent to calling the .B cleanup command after indexing. Please see the information for .B cleanup for details. .TP .B NOTE: It is probably not a good idea to run multiple instances of .B mu index concurrently. No data loss should occur, but one or more of the instances may experience errors due to database locks. Also note that, before indexing is completed, searches for messages may fail, even if they have already been indexed, as some of the esssential database information will only be written in batches during the indexing process. .SH THE FIND COMMAND The .B find command starts a search for messages in the database that match the search pattern. The search pattern is taken as a command line parameter. If the search parameter consists of multiple parts (multiple command line parameters) they are treated as if there were a logical \fBAND\fR between them. If you want to make your own constructions (using \fBAND\fR, \fBOR\fR, \fBNOT\fR etc., you have to put quote them so \fBmu\fR can consider them as a unit. \fBmu\fR relies on the Xapian database for its searching capabilities, so it offers all the search functionality that Xapian offers; please refer to: \fIhttp://xapian.org/docs/queryparser.html\fR Here, we will show the mu-specific ways to specify search patterns. .SS find options .SS query syntax In its simplest form, you can just can just specify a number of words, and .B mu will search for messages that match all of those words. So, .nf $ mu find monkey banana .fi will find all messages which have both "monkey" AND "banana" in one of those fields. .SH THE CLEANUP COMMAND .SH THE MKDIR COMMAND .SH OPTIONS .B mu has a number of general options, which work with all the commands. .B --maildir=, -m .I set the full path to the maildir; note that you can also specify this path as a non-option argument to .B mu-index ; if you use both, the non-option argument wins. .B --quiet|-q makes .B mu-index not put out any progress info during its indexing. This is not the default, as running may take quite some time, and might confuse novice users. .SH ENVIRONMENT As mentioned, \fBmu index\fR uses \fBMAILDIR\fR to find the user's Maildir if it has not been specified explicitly \fB\-\-maildir\fR=\fI\fR. If MAILDIR is not set, \fBmu index\fR will try \fI~/Maildir\fR. . .SH BUGS There probably are some; please report bugs when you find them: .BR http://code.google.com/p/mu0/issues/list .SH AUTHOR Dirk-Jan C. Binnema .SH "SEE ALSO" .BR maildir(5)