MINTRO(7) Miscellaneous Information Manual MINTRO(7) NAME mintro – Santoku introduction DESCRIPTION The Santoku message system is a set of Unix utilities to deal with mail kept in Maildir folders. Its design is roughly inspired by MH, the RAND Message Handling System, but its is a complete implementation from scratch. Santoku consists of a set of Unix tools that each do one job: maddr(1) to extract addresses from mail mcomp(1) to write and send mail mdeliver(1) to deliver messages or import mailboxes mdirs(1) to find Maildirs mflag(1) to change flags (marks) of mail mhdr(1) to extract mail headers minc(1) to incorporate new mail mless(1) to conveniently read mail in less(1) mlist(1) to list and filter mail messages mmime(1) to create MIME messages mrepl(1) to reply to mail mscan(1) to generate single line summaries of mail mseq(1) to manipulate mail sequences mshow(1) to render mail and extract attachments msort(1) to sort mail mthread(1) to arrange mail into discussions PRINCIPLES Santoku is a classic command line MUA with no features related to receiving and transferring mail. You are expected to fetch your mail using offlineimap(1), fdm(1), procmail(1), getmail(1) or similar and send it using sendmail(8), as provided by OpenSMTPD, Postfix, msmtp(1), dma(8) or similar. Santoku expects your mail to reside in Maildir folders. Santoku operates directly on Maildir and doesn't use caches or database. There is no setup needed for many uses. All tools have been written with performance in mind. Enumeration of all mails in a Maildir is avoided unless necessary, and then optimized to use few syscalls. Parsing mail metadata is optimized to use few I/O requests. Initial operations on big Maildir may feel slow, but as soon as they are in cache, everything is blazing fast. The tools are written to be memory efficient (i.e. not wasteful), but whole messages are assumed to fit into RAM easily (at a time). Santoku has been written from scratch and tested on a big pile of personal mail, but is not actually 100% RFC conforming (which is neither worth it nor desirable). There may be issues with very old, nonconforming, messages. Santoku is written in portable C, using only POSIX functions (apart from a tiny Linux-only optimization). It supports MIME and more than 7-bit messages (everything the host iconv(3) can decode). It assumes you work in a UTF-8 environment. Santoku works well together with other Unix mail tools such as offlineimap(1), mairix(1), or mu(1). EXAMPLES Santoku tools are designed to be composed together into a pipe. It is suitable for interactive use and for scripting. It integrates well into a Unix workflow. For example, you could decide you want to look at all unseen mail in your INBOX, oldest first. mlist -s ~/Maildir/INBOX | msort -d | mscan To operate on a set of mails in multiple steps, you can save a list of mail as a sequence. E.g. add a call to ‘mseq -S’ to above command: mlist -s ~/Maildir/INBOX | msort -d | mseq -S | mscan Now mscan will show message numbers and you could look at the first five mails at once, for example: mshow 1:5 Likewise, you could decide to look at all freshly received mail in all folders, thread it and look at it interactively: mdirs ~/Maildir | xargs minc | mthread | mless Or you could look at the attachments of the 20 largest mails in your INBOX: mlist ~/Maildir/INBOX | msort -s | tail -20 | mshow -t Or apply the patches from the current mail: mshow -O. '*.diff' | patch As usual with pipes, the sky is the limit. CONCEPTS Santoku deals with messages (which are files), folders (which are Maildir folders), sequences (which are newline-separated lists of messages, possibly persisted on disk in ~/.santoku/seq), and the current message (kept as a symlink in ~/.santoku/cur). Messages in the persisted sequence can be referred to using special syntax as explained in mmsg(7). Many utilities have a default behavior when used interactively from a terminal (e.g. operate on the current message or the current sequence). For scripting, you must make these arguments explicit. SEE ALSO mailx(1), nmh(7) AUTHORS Christian Neukirchen LICENSE Santoku is in the public domain. To the extent possible under law, the creator of this work has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work. http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ Void Linux July 22, 2016 Void Linux