Provided by: maildir-utils_0.9.9.5-3_amd64 
NAME
mu_find - find e-mail messages in the mu database.
SYNOPSIS
mu find [options] <search expression>
DESCRIPTION
mu find is the mu command for searching e-mail message that were stored earlier using mu index(1).
SEARCHING MAIL
mu find starts a search for messages in the database that match some search pattern. For example:
$ mu find subject:snow from:john
would find all messages from John with 'snow' in the subject field, something like:
2009-03-05 17:57:33 EET Lucia <lucia@example.com> running in the snow
2009-03-05 18:38:24 EET Marius <marius@foobar.com> Re: running in the snow
Note, this the default, plain-text output, which is the default, so you don't have to use --format=plain.
For other types of output (such as symlinks, XML or s-expressions), see the discussion in the OPTIONS-
section below about --format.
The search pattern is taken as a command-line parameter. If the search parameter consists of multiple
parts (as in the example) they are treated as if there were a logical AND between them.
mu relies on the Xapian database for its searching capabilities, so it offers all the search
functionality that Xapian offers; for all the details, see:
http://xapian.org/docs/queryparser.html
One special feature of mu is that is does not distinguish between uppercase and lowercase, nor the
accented or unaccented versions of characters. All match. In general, mu tries to be 'eager' in matching,
as filtering out unwanted results is usually preferrable over non matching messages.
A wildcard search is a search where a * matches the last n character(s) in some string. The string must
always start with one or more characters before the wildcards. Since version 0.9.6, mu also supports
wildcard searches for all fields except maildirs and paths. So, to get all mails with a subject
containing a word starting with com, you can use:
$ mu find 'subject:com*'
and get mails about computers, comments, compilation and so on. Note, when running from the command-line
it's important to put the query in quotes, otherwise the shell would interpret the '*'. It is equally
important to remember that the '*' invokes the wildcard search only when used as the rightmost character
of a search term. Furthermore, it is not a regular expression.
In older versions of mu, queries were logged in <mu-home>/mu.log; however, since version 0.9, mu no
longer does this.
The basic way to search a message is to type some words matching it, as you would do in an internet
search engine. For example,
$ mu find monkey banana
will find all messages that contain both 'monkey' and 'banana' in either body or subject or one of the
address-fields (to/from/cc).
As mentioned, matching is case-insensitive and accent-insensitive; thus
$ mu find Mönkey BÄNAÑå
yields the same results as the example above.
mu also recognizes prefixes for specific fields in a messages; for example:
$ mu find subject:penguin
to find messages with have the word penguin in the subject field. You can abbreviate subject: to just s:.
Here is the full table of the search fields and their abbreviations:
cc,c Cc (carbon-copy) recipient(s)
bcc,h Bcc (blind-carbon-copy) recipient(s)
from,f Message sender
to,t To: recipient(s)
subject,s Message subject
maildir,m Maildir
msgid,i Message-ID
prio,p Message priority ('low', 'normal' or 'high')
flag,g Message Flags
date,d Date-Range
size,z Message size
embed,e Search inside embedded text parts (messages, attachments)
file,j Attachment filename
mime,y MIME-type of one or more message parts
tag,x Tags for the message (X-Label and/or X-Keywords)
list,v Mailing list (e.g. the List-Id value)
There are also the special fields contact, which matches all contact-fields (from, to, cc and bcc), and
recip, which matches all recipient-fields (to, cc and bcc).
The meaning of most of the above fields should be clear, but some require some extra discusion. First,
the message flags field describes certain properties of the message, as listed in the following table:
d,draft Draft Message
f,flagged Flagged
n,new New message (in new/ Maildir)
p,passed Passed ('Handled')
r,replied Replied
s,seen Seen
t,thrashed Marked for deletion
a,attach Has attachment
z,signed Signed message
x,encrypted Encrypted message
Using this, we can search e.g. for all signed messages that have an attachment:
$ mu find flag:signed flag:attach
Encrypted messages may be signed as well, but this is only visible after decrypting, and thus, is
invisible to mu.
The message-priority has three possible values: low, normal or high. We can match them using prio: - for
example, to get all high-priority messages with a subject containing some bird:
$ mu find prio:high subject:nightingale
The Maildir field describes the directory path starting after the Maildir-base path, and before the /cur/
or /new/ part. So for example, if there's a message with the file name
~/Maildir/lists/running/cur/1234.213:2,, you could find it (and all the other messages in the same
maildir) with:
$ mu find maildir:/lists/running
Note the starting '/'. If you want to match mails in the 'root' maildir, you can do with a single '/':
$ mu find maildir:/
(and of course you can use the m: shortcut instead of maildir:)
The date: (or d:) search parameter is 'special' in the fact that it takes a range of dates. For now,
these dates are in ISO 8601 format (YYYYMMDDHHMM); you can leave out the right part, and mu will add the
rest, depending on whether this is the beginning or end of the date interval. For example, for the
beginning of the interval "201012" would be interpreted as "20101201010000", or December 1, 2010 at
00:00, while for the end of the interval, this would be interpreted as "20101231122359", or December 31,
2010 at 23:59.
To get all messages between (inclusive) the 5th of May 2009 and the 2nd of June 2010, you could use:
$ mu find date:20090505..20100602
Non-numeric characters are ignored, so the following is equivalent but more readable:
$ mu find date:2009-05-05..2010-06-02
Precision is up to the minute and 24-hour notation for times is used, so another example would be:
$ mu find date:2009-05-05/12:23..2010-06-02/17:18
mu also understand relative dates, in the form of a posiive number followed by h (hour), d (day), w
(week), m (30 days) or y (365 days). Some examples to explain this:
5h five hours in the past
2w two weeks in the past
3m three times 30 days in the past
1y 365 days in the past
Using this notation, you can for example match messages between two and three weeks old:
$ mu find date:3w..2w
There are some special keywords for dates, namely 'now', meaning the prsent moment and 'today' for the
beginning of today. So to get all messages sent or received today, you could use:
$ mu find date:today..now
The size or z allows you to match size ranges -- that is, match messages that have a byte-size within a
certain range. Units (B (for bytes), K (for 1000 bytes) and M (for 1000 * 1000 bytes) are supported). For
example, to get all messages between 10Kb and 2Mb (assuming SI units), you could use:
$ mu find size:10K..2M
It's important to remember that if a search term includes spaces, you should quote those parts. Thus,
when we look at the following examples:
$ mu find maildir:/Sent Items yoghurt
$ mu find maildir:'/Sent Items' yoghurt
The first query searches for messages in the /Sent maildir matching Items and yoghurt, while the second
query searches the /Sent Items maildir searching for messages matching yoghurt.
You can match all messages using "" (or ''):
$ mu find ""
OPTIONS
Note, some of the important options are described in the mu(1) man-page and not here, as they apply to
multiple mu-commands.
The find-command has various options that influence the way mu displays the results. If you don't specify
anything, the defaults are --fields="d f s", --sortfield=date and --reverse.
-f, --fields=<fields>
specifies a string that determines which fields are shown in the output. This string consists of a
number of characters (such as 's' for subject or 'f' for from), which will replace with the actual
field in the output. Fields that are not known will be output as-is, allowing for some simple
formatting.
For example:
$ mu find subject:snow --fields "d f s"
would list the date, subject and sender of all messages with 'snow' in the their subject.
The table of replacement characters is superset of the list mentions for search parameters; the
complete list:
t to: recipient
c cc: (carbon-copy) recipient
h Bcc: (blind carbon-copy, hidden) recipient
d Sent date of the message
f Message sender (from:)
g Message flags (flags)
l Full path to the message (location)
p Message priority (high, normal, low)
s Message subject
i Message-id
m maildir
The message flags are the same ones we already saw in the message flags above. Thus, a message
which is 'seen', has an attachment and is signed would have 'asz' as its corresponding output
string, while an encrypted new message would have 'nx'.
-s, --sortfield =<field> and -z,
--reverse specifies the field to sort the search results by, and the direction (i.e., 'reverse'
means that the sort should be reverted - Z-A). The following fields are supported:
cc,c Cc (carbon-copy) recipient(s)
bcc,h Bcc (blind-carbon-copy) recipient(s)
date,d message sent date
from,f message sender
maildir,m maildir
msgid,i message id
prio,p message priority
subject,s message subject
to,t To:-recipient(s)
Thus, for example, to sort messages by date, you could specify:
$ mu find fahrrad --fields "d f s" --sortfield=date --reverse
Note, if you specify a sortfield, by default, messages are sorted in reverse (descending) order
(e.g., from lowest to highest). This is usually a good choice, but for dates it may be more useful
to sort in the opposite direction.
--summary-len=<number>
If > 0, use that number of lines of the message to provide a summary.
--include-unreadable
normally, mu find does not include messages that are unreadable, typically do not have
corresponding disk file, i.e., messages that live only in the databases. With this option even
such messages are included. Note, for --format=links, unreadable message are ignore even when this
option is set.
--format=plain|links|xquery|xml|sexp
output results in the specified format.
The default is plain, i.e normal output with one line per message.
links outputs the results as a maildir with symbolic links to the found messages. This enables
easy integration with mail-clients (see below for more information). See --linksdir and
--clearlinks below.
xml formats the search results as XML.
sexp formats the search results as an s-expression as used in Lisp programming environments.
xquery shows the Xapian query corresponding to your search terms. This is meant for for debugging
purposes.
--linksdir =<dir> and -c, --clearlinks
output the results as a maildir with symbolic links to the found messages. This enables easy
integration with mail-clients (see below for more information). mu will create the maildir if it
does not exist yet.
If you specify --clearlinks, all existing symlinks will be cleared from the target maildir; this
allows for re-use of the same directory. An alternative would be to delete the target directory
before, but this has a big chance of accidentaly removing something that should not be removed.
$ mu find grolsch --linksdir=~/Maildir/search --clearlinks
will store links to found messages in ~/Maildir/search. If the directory does not exist yet, it
will be created.
Note: when mu creates a Maildir for these links, it automatically inserts a .noindex file, to
exclude the directory from mu index.
--after=<timestamp> only show messages whose message files were
last modified (mtime) after <timestamp>. <timestamp> is a UNIX time_t value, the number of seconds
since 1970-01-01 (in UTC).
From the command line, you can use the date command to get this value. For example, only consider
messages modified (or created) in the last 5 minutes, you could specify
--after=`date +%s --date='5 min ago'`
This is assuming the GNU date command.
--exec=<command>
the --exec command causes the command to be executed on each matched message; for example, to see
the raw text of all messages matching 'milkshake', you could use:
$ mu find milkshake --exec='less'
which is roughly equivalent to:
$ mu find milkshake --fields="l" | xargs less
-b, --bookmark=<bookmark>
use a bookmarked search query. Using this option, a query from your bookmark file will be
prepended to other search queries. See mu-bookmarks(1) for the details of the bookmarks file.
--skip-dups,-u whenever there are multiple messages with the
same name, only show the first one. This is useful if you have copies of the same message, which
is a common occurence when using e.g. Gmail together with offlineimap.
--include-related,-r also include messages being refered to by
the matched messages -- i.e.. include messages that are part of the same message thread as some
matched messages. This is useful if you want Gmail-style 'conversations'. Note, finding these
related messages make searches slower.
-t, --threads show messages in a 'threaded' format -- that is,
with indentation and arrows showing the conversation threads in the list of matching messages.
Messages in the threaded list are indented based on the depth in the discussion, and are prefix
with a kind of arrow with thread-related information about the message, as in the following table:
| | normal | orphan | duplicate |
|-------------+--------+--------+-----------|
| first child | `-> | `*> | `=> |
| other | |-> | |*> | |=> |
Here, an 'orphan' is a message without a parent message (in the list of matches), and a duplicate
is a message whose message-id was already seen before; not this may not really be the same
message, if the message-id was copied.
The algorithm used for determining the threads is based on Jamie Zawinksy's description:
http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html
Example queries
Here are some simple examples of mu search queries; you can make many more complicated queries using
various logical operators, parentheses and so on, but in the author's experience, it's usually faster to
find a message with a simple query just searching for some words.
Find all messages with both 'bee' and 'bird' (in any field)
$ mu find bee AND bird
or shorter, because AND is implied:
$ mu find bee bird
Find all messages with either Frodo or Sam:
$ mu find 'Frodo OR Sam'
Find all messages with the 'wombat' as subject, and 'capibara' anywhere:
$ mu find subject:wombat capibara
Find all messages in the 'Archive' folder from Fred:
$ mu find from:fred maildir:/Archive
Find all unread messages with attachments:
$ mu find flag:attach flag:unread
Find all messages with PDF-attachments:
$ mu find mime:application/pdf
Find all messages with attached images:
$ mu find 'mime:image/*'
Note[1]: the argument needs to be quoted, or the shell will interpret the '*' Note[2]: the '*' wild card
can only be used as the last (rightmost) part of a search term. Note[3]: non-word characters (such as €
or ☺) are ignore in queries; you cannot search for them.
Integrating mu find with mail clients
mutt
For mutt you can use the following in your muttrc; pressing the F8 key will start a search, and F9
will take you to the results.
# mutt macros for mu
macro index <F8> "<shell-escape>mu find --clearlinks --format=links --linksdir=~/Maildir/search " \
"mu find"
macro index <F9> "<change-folder-readonly>~/Maildir/search" \
"mu find results"
Wanderlust
Sam B suggested the following on the mu-mailing list. First add the following to your Wanderlust
configuraiton file:
(require 'elmo-search)
(elmo-search-register-engine
'mu 'local-file
:prog "/usr/local/bin/mu" ;; or wherever you've installed it
:args '("find" pattern "--fields" "l") :charset 'utf-8)
(setq elmo-search-default-engine 'mu)
;; for when you type "g" in folder or summary.
(setq wl-default-spec "[")
Now, you can search using the g key binding; you can also create permanent virtual folders when
the messages matching some expression by adding something like the following to your folders file.
VFolders {
[date:today..now]!mu "Today"
[size:1m..100m]!mu "Big"
[flag:unread]!mu "Unread"
}
After restarting Wanderlust, the virtual folders should appear.
Wanderlust (old)
Another way to intergrate mu and wanderlust is shown below; the aforementioned method is
recommended, but if that does not work for some reason, the below can be an alternative.
(defvar mu-wl-mu-program "/usr/local/bin/mu")
(defvar mu-wl-search-folder "search")
(defun mu-wl-search ()
"search for messages with `mu', and jump to the results"
(let* ((muexpr (read-string "Find messages matching: "))
(sfldr (concat elmo-maildir-folder-path "/"
mu-wl-search-folder))
(cmdline (concat mu-wl-mu-program " find "
"--clearlinks --format=links --linksdir='" sfldr "' "
muexpr))
(rv (shell-command cmdline)))
(cond
((= rv 0) (message "Query succeeded"))
((= rv 2) (message "No matches found"))
(t (message "Error running query")))
(= rv 0)))
(defun mu-wl-search-and-goto ()
"search and jump to the folder with the results"
(interactive)
(when (mu-wl-search)
(wl-summary-goto-folder-subr
(concat "." mu-wl-search-folder)
'force-update nil nil t)
(wl-summary-sort-by-date)))
;; querying both in summary and folder
(define-key wl-summary-mode-map (kbd "Q") ;; => query
'(lambda()(interactive)(mu-wl-search-and-goto)))
(define-key wl-folder-mode-map (kbd "Q") ;; => query
'(lambda()(interactive)(mu-wl-search-and-goto)))
RETURN VALUE
mu find returns 0 upon successful completion; if the search was performed, there needs to be a least one
match. Anything else leads to a non-zero return value, for example:
| code | meaning |
|------+--------------------------------|
| 0 | ok |
| 1 | general error |
| 2 | no matches (for 'mu find') |
| 4 | database is corrupted |
ENCODING
mu find output is encoded according the locale for --format=plain (the default), and UTF-8 for all other
formats (sexp, xml).
BUGS
Please report bugs if you find them: http://code.google.com/p/mu0/issues/list If you have specific
messages which are not matched correctly, please attach them (appropriately censored of course).
AUTHOR
Dirk-Jan C. Binnema <djcb@djcbsoftware.nl>
SEE ALSO
mu(1) mu-index(1)
User Manuals December 2012 MU-FIND(1)