mu

E-mail is the 'flow' in the work flow of many people. Consequently, one spends a lot of time searching for old e-mails, to dig up some important piece of information. With people having tens of thousands of e-mails (or more), this is becoming harder and harder. How to find that one e-mail in an evergrowing haystack?

Enter mu.

'mu' is a set of command-line tools for Linux/Unix that enable you to quickly find the e-mails you are looking for. First, a tool called mu-index fills a database with information about all your e-mails. After that, you can easily search for them, using mu-find and its dedicated query language.

For example:

 # get smith's mails with attachments from the last few weeks
 $ mu-find f:smith@example.com d:1m- F:a

 # get the mails mentioning some book on a mailing list
 $ mu-find x:'Fall of Hyperion' M:'BookClub'

The way to express the searches is a bit cryptic at first, but easy to learn (in the author's humble opinion); the mu-find manpage discusses syntax and usage, and has lots of examples.

Periodically, you can do a quick update of database by running mu-index again. You can combine mu searching with your existing e-mail program (e.g. mutt); the mu documentation has the details.

mu is free software released under GPLv3, that runs on Unix/Linux-based systems, and combines the power of the SQLite database and the Xapian text indexing engine. Important: for mu to work, your mails must be stored in a set of maildirs

For a practical introduction, there is a short HOWTO which might be helpful. For technical discussion, the author's blog might be interesting, as it goes through various aspects of designing and implementing mu.

Features:

• u-find:
• search for sender and recipient; subject, message-id; message date, both absolute dates, intervals and relative dates; message size, message flags (new/replied/trashed etc.) message body text; attachment / signed / encrypted; message priority
• define bookmarks for search queries;
• output to stdout, or as maildirs with links to the original messages; can also output the literal SQL-queries.
• mu-index:
• scan messages in recursive Maildirs, Maildir++ or separate files;
• extensive performance tuning option (--tune-...); the defaults should be fine, but tunable for specific performance vs memory use footprint;
• only changed messages are considered when re-indexing;

What is new in this release:

• mu/mu4e now supports 'related' messages (a la Gmail).
• Support for querying specific mailing lists was added.
• Guile scripts were integrated ('mu script').
• Support for embedded tags was improved, 'human dates' were implemented, and many other improvements were made.

What is new in version 0.9.9:

• This version adds crypto-support for both mu and mu4e, improved support for non-ASCII, and a number of performance improvements. mu4e, the Emacs frontend, has been given many UI improvements, more powerful extensibility, and much-improved documentation.

What is new in version 0.9.8.5:

• This version supports larger amounts of email and improves non-Latin support.
• Mu4e (the Emacs frontend) now support address autocompletion based on the hottest addresses in your mail corpus, richtext email with org-mode, navigation through all queries, narrowing of search results, support for inline images, and more.

What is new in version 0.9.8.4:

• This version has some important improvements for the core system and major new features for mu4e, the emacs frontend.
• The latter now allows for arbitrary user-defined actions for messages or attachments, marking threads, and regexp-marking.
• International (non-Latin) searching is much better supported now.

What is new in version 0.9.8.3:

• many improvements, fixes

What is new in version 0.9.8.1:

• Various small updates and improvements, mostly in the emacs frontend ("mu4e").
• Attachment handling was improved, some small fixes were made, and documentation was improved.

What is new in version 0.9.8:

• This version includes an Emacs-based email client ("mu4e"), much-improved guile bindings, searching for attachment mime types and searching inside any text part of a message, and more tests and improvements in many parts of the code.

What is new in version 0.9.8 Alpha 3:

• This version adds searches for attachment MIME type, and searching inside attachments.
• It also sees the first release of mu4e, an emacs email client ("mu4e") and much improved Guile bindings and documentation.
• There are quite a few internal improvements as well.

What is new in version 0.9.6:

• mu now supports wild-card searching in most fields: "mu find 'car*'".
• You can search for messages based on attachment file names and get colorized output using --color.
• There were some bugfixes and optimizations.

Requirements:

• GMime
• SQLite
• Xapian and Omega