path: root/man/mblaze.7

.Dd January 18, 2020
.Dt MBLAZE 7
.Os
.Sh NAME
.Nm mblaze
.Nd introduction to the mblaze message system
.Sh DESCRIPTION
The
.Nm
message system is a set of Unix utilities for processing and
interacting with mail messages which are stored in maildir folders.
.Pp
Its design is roughly inspired by MH, the RAND Message Handling
System, but it is a complete implementation from scratch.
.Pp
.Nm
consists of these Unix utilities that each do one job:
.Pp
.Bl -tag -width 11n -compact
.It Xr maddr 1
extract mail addresses from messages
.It Xr magrep 1
search messages matching a pattern
.It Xr mbnc 1
bounce messages
.It Xr mcom 1
compose and send messages
.It Xr mdeliver 1
deliver messages or import mbox file
.It Xr mdirs 1
list maildir folders, recursively
.It Xr mexport 1
export messages as mbox file
.It Xr mflag 1
manipulate maildir message flags
.It Xr mflow 1
reflow format=flowed plain text messages
.It Xr mfwd 1
forward messages
.It Xr mgenmid 1
generate a Message-ID
.It Xr mhdr 1
print message headers
.It Xr minc 1
incorporate new messages
.It Xr mless 1
conveniently read messages in
.Xr less 1
.It Xr mlist 1
list and filter messages
.It Xr mmime 1
create MIME messages
.It Xr mmkdir 1
create new maildir folders
.It Xr mpick 1
advanced message filter
.It Xr mrefile 1
move or copy messages between maildir folders
.It Xr mrep 1
reply to messages
.It Xr mscan 1
generate one-line message summaries
.It Xr msed 1
manipulate message headers
.It Xr mseq 1
manipulate message sequences
.It Xr mshow 1
render messages and extract MIME parts
.It Xr msort 1
sort messages
.It Xr mthread 1
arrange messages into discussions
.El
.Pp
.Nm
is a classic command line MUA and has no features
for receiving or transferring messages;
you can operate on messages in a local maildir spool,
or fetch your messages using
.Xr fdm 1 ,
.Xr getmail 1 ,
.Xr offlineimap 1 ,
or similar utilities,
and send it using
.Xr dma 8 ,
.Xr msmtp 1 ,
.Xr sendmail 8 ,
as provided by
OpenSMTPD,
Postfix,
or similar.
.Pp
.Nm
operates directly on maildir folders and doesn't
use its own caches or databases.
There is no setup needed for many uses.
All utilities have been written with performance in mind.
Enumeration of all messages in a maildir is avoided unless necessary,
and then optimized to limit syscalls.
Parsing message metadata is optimized to limit I/O requests.
Initial operations on a large maildir may feel slow, but as soon as they
are in the file system cache, everything is blazingly fast.
The utilities are written to be memory efficient
.Pq i.e. not wasteful ,
but whole messages are assumed to fit into RAM easily
.Pq one at a time .
.Pp
.Nm
has been written from scratch and is now well tested,
but it is not 100% RFC-conforming
.Pq which is neither worth it, nor desirable .
There may be issues with very old, nonconforming, messages.
.Pp
.Nm
is written in portable C, using only POSIX functions
.Pq apart from a tiny Linux-only optimization ,
and has no external dependencies.
It supports MIME and more than 7-bit messages
.Po
everything the host
.Xr iconv 3
can decode
.Pc .
It assumes you work in a UTF-8 environment.
.Nm
works well with other Unix utilities such as
.Xr mairix 1 ,
.Xr mu 1 ,
or
.Xr offlineimap 1 .
.Sh EXAMPLES
.Nm
utilities are designed to be composed together in a pipe.
They are suitable for interactive use and for scripting,
and integrate well into a Unix workflow.
.Pp
For example, you could decide you want to look at all unseen messages in your
INBOX, oldest first.
.Dl mlist -s ~/Maildir/INBOX | msort -d | mscan
.Pp
To operate on a set of messages in multiple steps,
you can save it as a sequence,
e.g. add a call to
.Ql mseq -S
to the above command:
.Dl mlist -s ~/Maildir/INBOX | msort -d | mseq -S | mscan
.Pp
Now mscan will show message numbers and you could look at the first
five messages at once, for example:
.Dl mshow 1:5
.Pp
Likewise, you could decide to incorporate
.Po
by moving from
.Pa new
to
.Pa cur
.Pc
all new messages in all folders,
thread it and look at it interactively:
.Dl mdirs ~/Maildir | xargs minc | mthread | mless
.Pp
Or you could list the attachments of the 20 largest messages in your INBOX:
.Dl mlist ~/Maildir/INBOX | msort -S | tail -20 | mshow -t
.Pp
Or apply the patches from the current message:
.Dl mshow -O . '*.diff' | patch
.Pp
As usual with pipes, the sky is the limit.
.Sh CONCEPTS
.Nm
deals with messages
.Pq which are files ,
folders
.Pq which are maildir folders ,
sequences
.Po
which are newline-separated lists of messages, possibly saved on disk in
.Pa ${MBLAZE:-$HOME/.mblaze}/seq
.Pc ,
and the current message
.Po
kept as a symlink in
.Pa ${MBLAZE:-$HOME/.mblaze}/cur
.Pc .
.Pp
Messages in the saved sequence can be referred to using special
syntax as explained in
.Xr mmsg 7 .
.Pp
Many utilities have a default behavior when used interactively from a terminal
.Pq e.g. operate on the current message or the current sequence .
For scripting, you must make these arguments explicit.
.Pp
For configuration, see
.Xr mblaze-profile 5 .
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr mailx 1 ,
.Xr mblaze-profile 5 ,
.Xr nmh 7
.Sh AUTHORS
.An Leah Neukirchen Aq Mt leah@vuxu.org
.Pp
There is a mailing list available at
.Mt mblaze@googlegroups.com
.Po
to subscribe, send a message to
.Mt mblaze+subscribe@googlegroups.com
.Pc ;
archives are available at
.Lk https://inbox.vuxu.org/mblaze/ .
There also is an IRC channel
.Li #vuxu
on irc.freenode.net.
Please report security-related bugs directly to the author.
.Sh LICENSE
.Nm
is in the public domain.
.Pp
To the extent possible under law,
the creator of this work
has waived all copyright and related or
neighboring rights to this work.
.Pp
.Lk http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/