31835200bd
This change adds a new cleanup mode that avoids cleanup having re-traverse the directories the index pass just looked at. Additionally, we efficiently query the Xapian database by walking the term list instead of doing multiple point-wise path lookups. I'd noticed that most of my time in mu's cleanup pass consisted of B-tree lookups in Xapian (one 8KB pread64 at a time). The point lookups forced Xapian to traverse from the root of the B-tree to the leaf for every single message. Additionally, in order to join on the message path, we had to do *another* B-tree traversal after locating each message term. Now we just walk the terms in order, which is much more efficient, as we touch each B-tree node only once. On my system, with 1371861 total messages, the total time of mu index (no lazy check): --nocleanup: 3.6s incremental cleanup: 4.2s (0.6s in cleanup) legacy cleanup: 5.2s (1.6s in cleanup) With the new mode, we save 1.0s of the 1.6s cleanup, so we're ~63% faster. But the incremental cleanup works even better with lazy checking. If I enable --lazy-check, dirty only my INBOX (360778 messages), and run index, I get: --nocleanup: 0.9s incremental cleanup: 1.1s (0.2s in cleanup) legacy cleanup: 2.5s (1.6s in cleanup) We save 1.4s out of 1.6s for ~88% speedup. This change also fixes a timestamp bug: we should be storing the *start* time of the index pass in metadata, not the end time, so that on the next index pass, we notice messages that arrived between the two times. All tests pass. You can set the environment variable MU_NO_INCREMENTAL_CLEANUP to use the legacy cleanup path instead.
#+TITLE:mu
Welcome to mu!
Latest development news: NEWS.org.
With 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, and quickly file away message for later use.
mu is a set of command-line tools for dealing with e-mail messages stored in the
Maildir-format. mu's goal is to help you to quickly find the messages you need,
view them, extract attachments, create new maildirs, and so on.
After indexing your messages into a Xapian-database, you can search them through a query language. You can use various message fields or words in the body text to find the right messages.
Built on top of mu are some extensions (included in this package):
mu4e: a full-featured e-mail client that runs inside emacsmu-scm: bindings for the Guile/Scheme programming language (version 3.0 and later)
mu is written in C++; mu4e is written in elisp and mu-scm is written in a mix of
C++ and Scheme.
mu is available in many Linux distributions (e.g. Debian/Ubuntu and Fedora)
under the name maildir-utils; apparently because they don't like short names.
All of the code is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License
version 3 (or higher).
Versions
mu attempts to balance development speed and stability.
Active development takes place on master (the 1.14 series), and we maintain
release/1.12 as well. When possible, fixes (but not features) from master are
back-ported to release/1.12.
Every few months, we release a stable version (e.g. 1.14.0); development then
continues in master, with -pre<n> (e.g. 1.14.1-pre1): -pre-suffixed versions
refer to the current development code, until it is released (and then looses its
-pre suffix, i.e., becomes the 1.14.1 release).
Hence, if you want to track active development, use master; if you want to avoid
any changes except bug-fixes, use a 1.12 release; otherwise, track master.
Overall, we try to avoid incompatible changes, but sometimes this is necessary, for example to update the versions of required libraries
Installation
Note: building from source is an advanced subject, especially if something goes wrong. The below simple examples are a start, but all tools involved have many options; there are differences between systems, versions etc. So if this is all a bit daunting we recommend to wait for someone else to build it for you, such as a Linux distribution. Many have packages available.
Requirements
To be able to build mu, ensure you have:
- a C++20 compiler (
gccandclangare known to work) - development packages for Xapian and GMime and GLib (see
meson.buildfor the versions) - basic tools such as
make,sed,grep meson
For mu4e, you also need emacs, version 28 or later.
Note, support for Windows is very much experimental, that is, it works for some people, but we can't really support it due to lack of the specific expertise. Help is welcome!
Building
$ git clone https://github.com/djcb/mu.git $ cd mu
mu uses meson for building, so you can use that directly, and all the usual
commands apply. You can also use it indirectly through the provided Makefile,
which provides a number of useful targets.
For instance, using the Makefile, you could install mu using:
$ ./autogen.sh && make $ sudo make install
You can of course also run meson directly (see the meson documentation for more
details):
$ meson setup build $ meson compile -C build $ meson install -C build
Contributing
Contributions are welcome! See the Github issue list and IDEAS.org.