Intro

Searching through all your different mailboxes can be cumbersome without tools that were made for the job. A simple grep -Er will return many headers and lines without context, apart from being really slow.

These applications index your messages in their own databases for fast searching. Remember to schedule the update of the databases, probably using cron.

All of them usually create a virtual maildir, containing symbolic links to the original messages (or a copy in case of mbox). If one wants to rename (for setting/clearing flags), delete or edit the mails, it is only possible using the original message. There is currently no way to do this in mutt, but there is a ​small shell script which can be called by a macro.

mairix

​Mairix is a program for indexing and searching email messages stored in Maildir, MH or mbox folders. The mailboxes can also be in gzip (version 0.17) or bzip2 (version 0.18) format, which makes it great for archived mailboxes. (Check out ​archivemail.)

When you perform a lookup, it creates copies or symbolic links to the directory specified by mfolder, depending on whether you've configured it to ouput in Maildir, mbox, MH or raw format. (the former is the default)

 ~/.mairixrc
 base=~/.maildir
 mfolder=.Search
 database=~/.mairixdb
 maildir=.
 maildir=.lists*
 maildir=.newsletters*
 maildir=.people*
 maildir=.personal*
 maildir=.system*
 maildir=.Sent

It's important that the directory in which the results are going to be saved is excluded from being indexed.

After configuring it, `mairix' must be executed with no arguments so that the database is created.

It's very annoying to have mairix complain about the existance of a lockfile when no mairix process is running. Thus, here's ashort script that removes it.

~/bin/mairix
 DB=~/.mairixdb
 trap 'rm "$DB.lock"' 1 2 3 15
 /usr/bin/mairix "$@"

mairix syntax description: ​https://github.com/rc0/mairix

nmzmail

​nmzmail is a tool to use the ​namazu2 search engine from within the mutt mail reader to search mail stored in maildir folders.

nmzmail has no configuration file, it writes its output (index, history and search results) to ~/.nmzmail, though these values can be overridden at runtime.

Here's a script to index your mailboxes that allows you to exclude some of them.

~/bin/nmzmail-index.sh
 #!/bin/bash
 # nmzmail-index.sh - Angel Olivera <redondos@aolivera.com.ar>
 
 # Tweak MAX_MAIL_DIRS at nmzmail compile time. (default=32)
 # EXCEPTIONS is in bash glob syntax, see bash(1) for "Pathname Expansion"
 
 BASE=~/.maildir
 EXCEPTIONS="Spam Search sys*"
 
 shopt -s dotglob extglob
 EXCEPTIONS=${EXCEPTIONS// /|}
 
 for mailbox in $BASE/!(+([^.])|.+($EXCEPTIONS)); do
         ARGS[i++]="$mailbox"
 done
 
 # Uncomment to include the inbox
 # ARGS[i++]="$BASE/cur" && ARGS[i++]="$BASE/new"
 
 nmzmail -i "${ARGS[@]}"

namazu syntax description: ​http://search.namazu.org/

mu (maildir-utils)

​mu is yet another mail indexer which integrates well with Mutt. It is based on ​Sqlite (for mail metadata) and ​Xapian (for full text search). A very brief (and surely biased by author's final choice) among mu, mairix, and nmzmail (discussed above) ​has been blogged about.

Querying is performed using the Xapian query language.

At first, you will need to index all your Maildirs; assuming they are all stored recursively under a single directory, you can do that with

 mu-index -m PATH

If the dir is ~/Maildir or some other common place (e.g. defined in $MAILDIR), you can avoid passing -m.

Then, you can periodically update the index via cron or any other mean. You can do that with the following cron entry:

 31  */2 *  *   *     on_ac_power && mu-index -q

With about 20'000 mails it is quite fast and finishes in a few seconds.

Macros for Mutt integration are reported below.

mutt configuration

~/.mutt/macros

 ## Search mail

 # Mairix
 macro generic ,f "<shell-escape>mairix " "search via mairix"

 # Namazu/nmzmail
 macro generic ,F "<shell-escape>nmzmail -r ~/.maildir/.Search<enter>" "search via nmzmail"
 # Load the results mailbox
 macro generic ,,f "<change-folder><kill-line>=.Search<enter>" "load the search results mailbox"

 # Mu
 # first macro does the search according to user query, second macro jumps to result list
 macro index <F8> "<shell-escape>rm -rf ~/.mu/results; mu-find -o l -l ~/.mu/results " "mu-find"              
 macro index <F9> "<change-folder-readonly>~/.mu/results\n" "display mu-find results"                         

Of course, macros can be written to immediately change to the folder with the results, though YMMV.