leahneukirchen / Mblaze

MBLAZE(7) Miscellaneous Information Manual MBLAZE(7)

NAME mblaze – introduction to the mblaze message system

DESCRIPTION The mblaze message system is a set of Unix utilities for processing and interacting with mail messages which are stored 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 utilities that each do one job:

 maddr(1)     extract mail addresses from messages
 magrep(1)    search messages matching a pattern
 mbnc(1)      bounce messages
 mcom(1)      compose and send messages
 mdeliver(1)  deliver messages or import mbox file
 mdirs(1)     list maildir folders, recursively
 mexport(1)   export messages as mbox file
 mflag(1)     manipulate maildir message flags
 mflow(1)     reflow format=flowed plain text messages
 mfwd(1)      forward messages
 mgenmid(1)   generate a Message-ID
 mhdr(1)      print message headers
 minc(1)      incorporate new messages
 mless(1)     conveniently read messages in less(1)
 mlist(1)     list and filter messages
 mmime(1)     create MIME messages
 mmkdir(1)    create new maildir folders
 mpick(1)     advanced message filter
 mrefile(1)   move or copy messages between maildir folders
 mrep(1)      reply to messages
 mscan(1)     generate one-line message summaries
 msed(1)      manipulate message headers
 mseq(1)      manipulate message sequences
 mshow(1)     render messages and extract MIME parts
 msort(1)     sort messages
 mthread(1)   arrange messages into discussions

 mblaze 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 fdm(1), getmail(1), offlineimap(1),
 or similar utilities, and send it using dma(8), msmtp(1), sendmail(8), as
 provided by OpenSMTPD, Postfix, or similar.

 mblaze 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 (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 is now well tested, but it is
 not 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 with other Unix utilities such as mairix(1), mu(1), or
 offlineimap(1).

EXAMPLES mblaze 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.

 For example, you could decide you want to look at all unseen messages in
 your INBOX, oldest first.
       mlist -s ~/Maildir/INBOX | msort -d | mscan

 To operate on a set of messages 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
 messages at once, for example:
       mshow 1:5

 Likewise, you could decide to incorporate (by moving from new to cur) all
 new messages 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 messages in your
 INBOX:
       mlist ~/Maildir/INBOX | msort -S | tail -20 | mshow -t

 Or apply the patches from the current message:
       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 [email protected]

 There is a mailing list available at [email protected] (to
 subscribe, send a message to [email protected]); archives
 are available at https://inbox.vuxu.org/mblaze/. There also is an IRC
 channel #vuxu on irc.freenode.net.  Please report security-related bugs
 directly to the author.

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/

Void Linux January 18, 2020 Void Linux