Welcome to mu!

Latest development news: NEWS.org.

With the enormous amounts of e-mail many people gather and the importance of e-mail message in our work-flows, it’s essential to quickly deal with all that mail - in particular, to instantly find that one important e-mail you need right now, and quickly file away message for later use.

mu is a set of command-line tools for dealing with e-mail messages stored in the Maildir-format. mu’s goal is to help you to quickly find the messages you need, view them, extract attachments, create new maildirs, and so on.

After indexing your messages into a Xapian-database, you can search them through a query language. You can use various message fields or words in the body text to find the right messages.

Built on top of mu are some extensions (included in this package):

• mu4e: a full-featured e-mail client that runs inside emacs
• mu-scm: bindings for the Guile/Scheme programming language (version 3.0 and later)

mu is written in C++; mu4e is written in elisp and mu-scm is written in a mix of C++ and Scheme.

mu is available in many Linux distributions (e.g. Debian/Ubuntu and Fedora) under the name maildir-utils; apparently because they don’t like short names. All of the code is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 (or higher).

mu attempts to balance development speed and stability. For this, every few months there is a stable version (e.g. 1.12.12); development then continues in in master, with -dev<n> (e.g. 1.12.13-dev2): -dev-suffixed versions refer to the current development code, until it is released (and then looses its -dev suffix, i.e., becomes the 1.12.13 release).

So if you want stability, grab the release; if you are more adventurous/impatient, git master is there as well.

Note: building from source is an advanced subject, especially if something goes wrong. The below simple examples are a start, but all tools involved have many options; there are differences between systems, versions etc. So if this is all a bit daunting we recommend to wait for someone else to build it for you, such as a Linux distribution. Many have packages available.

To be able to build mu, ensure you have:

• a C++17 compiler (gcc and clang are known to work)
• development packages for Xapian and GMime and GLib (see meson.build for the versions)
• basic tools such as make, sed, grep
• meson

For mu4e, you also need emacs.

Note, support for Windows is very much experimental, that is, it works for some people, but we can’t really support it due to lack of the specific expertise. Help is welcome!

$ git clone https://github.com/djcb/mu.git
$ cd mu

mu uses meson for building, so you can use that directly, and all the usual commands apply. You can also use it indirectly through the provided Makefile, which provides a number of useful targets.

For instance, using the Makefile, you could install mu using:

$ ./autogen.sh && make
$ sudo make install

You can of course also run meson directly (see the meson documentation for more details):

$ meson setup build
$ meson compile -C build
$ meson install -C build

Contributions are welcome! See the Github issue list and IDEAS.org.