.TH MU-EASY 1 "September 2010" "User Manuals"

.SH NAME 

mu easy \- a quick introduction to mu

.SH DESCRIPTION

As you may know, \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 individual
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 'index' command (and therefore, the ones that depend on
that, 'cleanup' and 'search'), require that you store your mail in the
Maildir-format. If you don't do so, you can still use the other commands, but
cannot 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, drive etc. Usually, indexing should be able
to reach a speed of a few hundred messages per second. 

Indexing gives some progress information, and it shows which directories it is
indexing. If the Maildir-directory it guessed is not the right one, you can
use the \fI--maildir\fR option. See the \fBmu-index\fR man page for more
detail.

Note, you 

.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 mail from Mickey Mouse about birds: 
.nf
\fB$ mu find f:mickey birds\fR 
.fi


.SH BUGS
Please report bugs if you find them:
.BR http://code.google.com/p/mu0/issues/list

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

.SH "SEE ALSO"
mu(1) mu-index(1) mu-cleanup(1) mu-find(1) mu-mkdir(1) mu-view(1) mu-extract(1)