3.4 KiB
Questions & answers about mu.
Indexing
Q: I have some maildirs with spam and junk e-mail that I don't want to
include in the indexing process. How can I tell mu to ignore those?
A: Put a file called .noindex in the directory (maildir) you'd like
to ignore, and mu will not index that directory, nor any of its
sub-maildirs.
Q: mu index complains about some messages being too big; what can I do
about that?
A: since 0.9.2, there is --max-msg-size where you can set the maximum
size (in bytes) of messages that mu should consider. In older versions,
you'd need to update MU_MAILDIR_WALK_MAX_FILE_SIZE in mu-maildir.c and
recompile.
Searching
Q: Do you have some examples of queries?
A: sure, see the mu-easy man page (man mu-easy), or see below.
Q: I have some folders with spaces in their names; how can I match those?
A: You'll have to quote the folder name; and from the command line that means you'll have to escape those quotes; for example:
$ mu find maildir:"\"Sent Items\""
Note that matching maildirs with 'special' characters like dots, '@' was
problematic in some older mu-versions, but should work well with the
0.9.2 and beyond.
Q: I'd like to get the result of a query as a list of the message files. Is that possible?
A: Yes; using the l (small letter L) in the format, you can do something
like:
$ mu find --fields=l athens
to get the file names (paths) of all messages about Athens. Of course, you can use that for further processing. For example, to get list of e-mail files sorted by their length in lines:
$ mu find --fields=l athens | xargs wc -l | sort -n
Showing the results
Q: Can I get the output in some other format that lines of plain text? Say, in XML?
A: Starting with version 0.9.2, there is (experimental) support for output
in XML, JSON and s-expressions. Use --format=xml-argument (or
--format=sexp, --format=json ) to mu find for this. Note that this is
still experimental, and the exact formats have not been fixed yet.
Q: Can I integrate mu find with my e-mail client?
A: Yes, at least for some mail clients like mutt and Wanderlust (for
emacs) you can do that. For this, mu uses a special trick where the
results of a search are put in a special temporary maildir with symbolic
links to the found messages, and the visiting this temporary maildir with
the mail client. The mu-find man page has some examples on how to
integrate this with mail clients.
Q: Is there some GUI for mu?
A: A GUI is being developed, but it will take some time to be
ready. However, as of version 0.9.1, in the toys/-directory of the mu
source package you'll find mug and mug2, which show-case parts of the
future GUI. mug2 is the more feature-rich one, and requires a fairly
recent GTK+/Glib and Webkit, while mug only requires GTK+. If you have the
required packages, mug=/=mug2 will automatically be built; however, make
install will not install them. You'll need to run them from their
directory. Screenshot.
