MBLAZE(7)

NAME
mblaze - introduction to mblaze

DESCRIPTION
The mblaze 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 it is a complete implementation from scratch.

mblaze consists of these Unix tools that each do one job:
maddr(1)
    extract addresses from mail
magrep(1)
    find mails matching a pattern
mcom(1)
    compose and send mail
mdeliver(1)
    deliver messages or import mailboxes
mdirs(1)
    find Maildir folders
mexport(1)
    export Maildir folders as mailboxes
mflag(1)
    change flags (marks) of mail
mfwd(1)
    forward mail
mgenmid(1)
    generate Message-IDs
mhdr(1)
    extract mail headers
minc(1)
    incorporate new mail
mless(1)
    conveniently read mail in less(1)
mlist(1)
    list and filter mail messages
mmime(1)
    create MIME messages
mmkdir(1)
    create new Maildir
mpick(1)
    advanced mail filter
mrep(1)
    reply to mail
mscan(1)
    generate one-line summaries of mail
msed(1)
    manipulate mail headers
mseq(1)
    manipulate mail sequences
mshow(1)
    render mail and extract attachments
msort(1)
    sort mail
mthread(1)
    arrange mail into discussions

PRINCIPLES
mblaze is a classic command line MUA and has no features for receiving or transferring mail; you are expected to fetch your mail using fdm(1), getmail(1) offlineimap(1), procmail(1), or similar , and send it using dma(8), msmtp(1), sendmail(8), as provided by OpenSMTPD, Postfix, or similar. mblaze expects your mail to reside in Maildir folders.

mblaze operates directly on Maildir folders and doesn't use its 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 limit syscalls. Parsing mail 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 tools are written to be memory efficient (i.e. not wasteful), but whole messages are assumed to fit into RAM easily (one at a time).

mblaze has been written from scratch and tested on a large corpus 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.

mblaze 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 iconv(3) can decode). It assumes you work in a UTF-8 environment. mblaze works well together with other Unix mail tools such as mairix(1), mu(1), or offlineimap(1).

EXAMPLES
mblaze tools 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.

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 it as a sequence, e.g. add a call to ‘mseq -S’ to the 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 incorporate (by moving from new to cur) all new mail in all folders, thread it and look at it interactively:
    mdirs ~/Maildir | xargs minc | mthread | mless

Or you could list 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
mblaze deals with messages (which are files), folders (which are Maildir folders), sequences (which are newline-separated lists of messages, possibly saved on disk in ${MBLAZE:-$HOME/.mblaze}/seq), and the current message (kept as a symlink in ${MBLAZE:-$HOME/.mblaze}/cur).

Messages in the saved 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.

For configuration, see mblaze-profile(5).

SEE ALSO
mailx(1), mblaze-profile(5), nmh(7)

AUTHORS
Leah Neukirchen <leah@vuxu.org>

There is a mailing list available at mblaze@googlegroups.com (to subscribe, send a mail to mblaze+subscribe@googlegroups.com. Please report security-related bugs directly to the author), as well as an IRC channel #vuxu on irc.freenode.net.

LICENSE
mblaze 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/