path: root/man/mblaze.7

.Dd July 22, 2016
.Dt MBLAZE 7
.Os
.Sh NAME
.Nm mblaze
.Nd introduction to mblaze
.Sh DESCRIPTION
The
.Nm
message system is a set of Unix utilities to deal with
mail kept in Maildir folders.
.Pp
Its design is roughly inspired by MH, the RAND Message Handling
System, but its is a complete implementation from scratch.
.Pp
.Nm
consists of a set of Unix tools that each do one job:
.Bl -tag -width 11n -compact
.It Xr maddr 1
to extract addresses from mail
.It Xr magrep 1
to find mails matching a pattern
.It Xr mcom 1
to write and send mail
.It Xr mdeliver 1
to deliver messages or import mailboxes
.It Xr mdirs 1
to find Maildirs
.It Xr mexport 1
to export mailboxes
.It Xr mflag 1
to change flags (marks) of mail
.It Xr mgenmid 1
to generate Message-IDs
.It Xr mhdr 1
to extract mail headers
.It Xr minc 1
to incorporate new mail
.It Xr mless 1
to conveniently read mail in
.Xr less 1
.It Xr mlist 1
to list and filter mail messages
.It Xr mmime 1
to create MIME messages
.It Xr mpick 1
to filter mail
.It Xr mrep 1
to reply to mail
.It Xr mscan 1
to generate single line summaries of mail
.It Xr msed 1
to manipulate mail headers
.It Xr mseq 1
to manipulate mail sequences
.It Xr mshow 1
to render mail and extract attachments
.It Xr msort 1
to sort mail
.It Xr mthread 1
to arrange mail into discussions
.El
.Sh PRINCIPLES
.Nm
is a classic command line MUA with no features related to receiving
and transferring mail.
You are expected to fetch your mail using
.Xr offlineimap 1 ,
.Xr fdm 1 ,
.Xr procmail 1 ,
.Xr getmail 1
or similar
and send it using
.Xr sendmail 8 ,
as provided by
OpenSMTPD,
Postfix,
.Xr msmtp 1 ,
.Xr dma 8
or similar.
.Nm
expects your mail to reside in Maildir folders.
.Pp
.Nm
operates directly on Maildir and doesn't use own caches or databases.
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 file system 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).
.Pp
.Nm
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.
.Pp
.Nm
is written in portable C, using only POSIX functions (apart from a tiny
Linux-only optimization),
and has no external dependencies.
It supports MIME and more than 7-bit messages (everything the host
.Xr iconv 3
can decode).
It assumes you work in a UTF-8 environment.
.Nm
works well together with other Unix mail tools such as
.Xr offlineimap 1 ,
.Xr mairix 1 ,
or
.Xr mu 1 .
.Sh EXAMPLES
.Nm
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.
.Pp
For example, you could decide you want to look at all unseen mail in your
INBOX, oldest first.
.Dl 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
.Ql mseq -S
to above command:
.Dl 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:
.Dl mshow 1:5
Likewise, you could decide to look at all freshly received mail in all
folders, thread it and look at it interactively:
.Dl mdirs ~/Maildir | xargs minc | mthread | mless
Or you could look at the attachments of the 20 largest mails in your INBOX:
.Dl mlist ~/Maildir/INBOX | msort -s | tail -20 | mshow -t
Or apply the patches from the current mail:
.Dl mshow -O . '*.diff' | patch
As usual with pipes, the sky is the limit.
.Sh CONCEPTS
.Nm
deals with messages (which are files),
folders (which are Maildir folders),
sequences (which are newline-separated lists of messages, possibly persisted on disk in
.Pa ${MBLAZE:-$HOME/.mblaze}/seq ) ,
and the current message (kept as a symlink in
.Pa ${MBLAZE:-$HOME/.mblaze}/cur ) .
.Pp
Messages in the persisted 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
(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
.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/