NAME

       mu_cfind - find and export contacts in the mu database

SYNOPSIS

       mu cfind [options] [<pattern>]

DESCRIPTION

       mu  cfind is the mu command for finding contacts (name and e-mail address of people who were either an e-
       mail's sender or receiver). There are different output formats available, for importing the contacts into
       other programs.

SEARCHING CONTACTS

       When you index your messages (see mu index), mu creates a list of unique e-mail addresses found  and  the
       accompanying  name,  and  caches this list. In case the same e-mail address is used with different names,
       the most recent non-empty name is used.

       mu cfind starts a search for contacts that match a regular expression. For example:

          $ mu cfind '@gmail.com'

       would find all contacts with a gmail-address, while

          $ mu cfind Mary

       lists all contacts with Mary in either name or e-mail address.

       If you do not specify a search expression, mu cfind returns the full list of  contacts.  Note,  mu  cfind
       does  not  use  the  database, but uses a cache file with e-mail addresses, which is populated during the
       indexing process.

       The regular expressions are Perl-compatible (as per the PCRE-library used by GRegex).

OPTIONS

       --format=plain|mutt-alias|mutt-ab|wl|org-contact|bbdb|csv
              sets the output format to the given value. The following are available:

              | --format=   | description                       |
              |-------------+-----------------------------------|
              | plain       | default, simple list              |
              | mutt-alias  | mutt alias-format                 |
              | mutt-ab     | mutt external address book format |
              | wl          | wanderlust addressbook format     |
              | org-contact | org-mode org-contact format       |
              | bbdb        | BBDB format                       |
              | csv         | comma-separated values (*)     |

              (*) CSV is not really standardized, but mu cfind follows some common practices:  any  double-quote
              is  replaced  by a double-double quote (thus, "hello" become ""hello"", and fields with commas are
              put in double-quotes. Normally, this should only apply to name fields.

       --personal only show addresses seen in messages where one of 'my'
              e-mail addresses was seen in one of the address fields; this is to exclude addresses only seen  in
              mailing-list messages. See the --my-address parameter in mu index.

       --after=<timestamp> only show addresses last seen 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
              addresses last seen after 2009-06-01, you could specify
                --after=`date +%s --date='2009-06-01'`

RETURN VALUE

       mu cfind returns 0 upon successful completion -- that is, at least one contact was found.  Anything  else
       leads to a non-zero return value:

       | code | meaning                        |
       |------+--------------------------------|
       |    0 | ok                             |
       |    1 | general error                  |
       |    2 | no matches (for 'mu cfind')    |

INTEGRATION WITH MUTT

       You  can use mu cfind as an external address book server for mutt. For this to work, add the following to
       your muttrc:

       set query_command = "mu cfind --format=mutt-ab '%s'"

       Now, in mutt, you can easily search for e-mail addresses using the query-command, which is  (by  default)
       accessible by pressing Q.

ENCODING

       mu  cfind  output is encoded according to the current locale except for --format=bbdb. This is hard-coded
       to UTF-8, and as such specified in the output-file, so emacs/bbdb can handle  things  correctly,  without
       guessing.

BUGS

       Please report bugs if you find them at https://github.com/djcb/mu/issues.

AUTHOR

       Dirk-Jan C. Binnema <djcb@djcbsoftware.nl>

SEE ALSO

       mu(1) mu-index(1) mu-find(1) pcrepattern(3)

User Manuals                                        May 2013                                         MU-CFIND(1)