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.

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:

Now mscan will show message numbers and you could look at the first five messages at once, for example:

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:

Or you could list the attachments of the 20 largest messages in your INBOX:

Or apply the patches from the current message:

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 message to mblaze+subscribe@googlegroups.com); archives are available at https://inbox.vuxu.org/mblaze/. There also is an IRC channel #vuxu on irc.libera.chat. 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/