Provided by:
maildir-utils_0.4-2_i386 
NAME
mu-index - index the contents of a Maildir or file
SYNOPSIS
mu-index [options] [maildir]
DESCRIPTION
mu-index recursively scans a email messages, and stores the information
found. This stored information can then be used for searching emails.
Usually, a recursive set of Maildir folders is scanned for all
messages, but also single messages can be scanned.
mu-index understands Maildirs as defined by Dan Bernstein for qmail. It
also understands recursive Maildirs (Maildirs within Maildirs), and the
VFAT-version of Maildir, as used by Tinymail/Modest.
The first run of mu-index can take some time; on the author’s 4-year
old machine using mu version 0.2, scanning 10000 messages takes around
92 seconds, or about 110 messages per second. Fortunately, a full scan
has to be done only once, after that it suffices to index the changes,
which goes much faster.
There is ongoing work on optimizing mu-index ; so hopefully future
versions will be faster (note that version 0.2 is almost three times
faster than version 0.1).
mu-index stores the information it finds in the mu-directory in two
databases:
The first one is mu-sqlite.db-<version> , which is an SQLite3 database
with meta data about the indexed messages. One can access this database
with the sqlite3(1) command line tool. In the mu-source code, you can
find the database schema in index/storage.sql.
The second one is mu-xapian.db-<version> , which is a Xapian database
and contains content data about indexed messages found.
The database schema might change in future versions; however note that
the <version> refers to the database version , which is not necessarily
following the versions of mu itself.
NOTE: It is probably not a good idea to run multiple instances of mu-
index that write to the same database at the same time. No data loss
should occur, but one or more of the instance might experience errors
due to database locks.
Also, before indexing has completed, searches for messages may fail,
even if they have already been indexed, as some of the esssential
database information will only be written at the end of the indexing.
OPTIONS
(NB: see CONFIGURATION as well for using the configuration file)
--maildir=, -m <maildir> set the full path to the maildir; note that
you can also specify this path as a non-option argument to mu-index ;
if you use both, the non-option argument wins.
--quiet|-q makes 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.
General options
--home=, -h <dir> sets the mu home directory; default is ~/.mu ; this
directory is where the message database is stored, as well as
configuration files and logs.
--log-stderr, -s write logging information to standard error instead of
to <mu-home-directory>/mu-find.log, which is the default.
--log-append, -a append to the log file instead of overwriting it for
every run, which is the default.
--debug, -d add a lot of logging for debugging purposes
Performance tuning
Even though the defaults should be fine for most use cases, it is
possible to tune the indexing process. The following options are
available:
--tune-sqlite-transaction-size= --tune-xapian-transaction-size= <size>
Sets the number of messages that are updated/inserted per transaction,
for sqlite and Xapian. Setting the number higher improves the
performance, but also increases the memory usage very significantly.
And of course, in case of problems, up to <size> changes will be rolled
back (this is very rare though). For SQLite, the default is 100 and
for Xapian it is 1000. It seems that setting the value higher does not
improve performance very much.
--tune-synchronous= <sync> Determines whether we wait for changes to be
written to disk before continuing; possible values for sync are 2 (full
synchronization), 1 (normal), 0 (no synchronization), with the latter
being the fastest. Default is 0 (no synchronization). In mu’s case,
that is safe, as we don’t lose any data, even if the indexing operation
fails for some reason.
This option corresponds to PRAGMA synchronous in
http://www.sqlite.org/pragma.html Values other that 0,1,2 for sync are
ignored.
--tune-temp-store= <store> Determines where we store temporary data is
stored; options are 0 (the default for SQLite), 1 (file) or 2 (memory).
The latter is much faster, but consumes more memory. The default value
(for mu) is 2.
This option corresponds to PRAGMA temp_store in
http://www.sqlite.org/pragma.html Values other that 0,1,2 for store are
ignored.
--tune-sort-inodes determines whether we sort the inodes before
scanning a directory. When using an ext3 filesystem with the dir_index
option enabled, this gives significant speedups. It does not seem to
affect other filesystems very much. The parameter takes the values 0
(turn off) or 1 (turn on). It is on by default.
Again, we stress that in most cases, there should be no reason to use
touch these tuning options. However, if you are in a resource-
constrained environment, you could opt for using less memory, at a
considerable speed penalty.
CONFIGURATION
Instead of specifying the options on the command line, you can also
specify them in the mu.conf configuration file, in the mu home
directory (by default, ~/.mu ). The General options go in the section
[mu] while the mu-index specific options go under [mu-index]. For
example, your configuration file could look something like this:
[mu]
debug=false
[mu-index]
maildir=~/MyMaildir
Note that command line arguments take precedence over the configuration
file.
MAILDIR SUPPORT
mu-index supports an extended version of maildir(5) ; in particular, it
supports (a) a tree of Maildirs (strictly, the maildir specification
does not allow this, but it is useful and widely supported), and (b) it
supports ’!’ in addition to ’:’ as separators in mail filenames, which
some e-mail programs (such as modest(1) and the Maildir module in
python(1) use to support on VFAT filesystems, which don’t allow ’:’ in
filenames.
mu-index ignores messages it cannot read or stat(2) ; but failure to
read or stat will be logged. Files starting with ’.’ are ignored, but
directories are not. Thus, if there is a message .dotdir/new/mymsg1234
it will be indexed. This allows indexing Maildir++ directories, as used
by CourierIMAP and Dovecot
mu-index processes messages in cur/ and new/ leaf directories; it will
ignore messages in tmp/
Thus, [....]/tmp/msg02 will be ignored, while [....]/new/msg01 won’t.
On the other hand, [....]/tmp/cur/msg03 would not be ignored, while
[....]/cur/tmp/msg04 would.
Note: single messages that are added by providing their full pathname
to mu-index will not have their path checked.
ENVIRONMENT
mu-index uses MAILDIR to find the user’s Maildir if it has not been
specified explicitely (in either configuration file or command line).
In that case, if MAILDIR is not set, mu-index will try $HOME/Maildir
BUGS
Please report bugs when you find them:
http://code.google.com/p/mu0/issues/list
AUTHOR
Dirk-Jan C. Binnema <djcb@djcbsoftware.nl>
SEE ALSO
mu-find(1), sqlite3(1), maildir(5)