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MINTRO(7) Miscellaneous Information Manual MINTRO(7)
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NAME
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mintro – Santoku introduction
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DESCRIPTION
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The Santoku message system is a set of Unix utilities to deal with mail
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kept in Maildir folders.
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Its design is roughly inspired by MH, the RAND Message Handling System,
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but its is a complete implementation from scratch.
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Santoku consists of a set of Unix tools that each do one job:
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maddr(1) to extract addresses from mail
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mcomp(1) to write and send mail
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mdeliver(1) to deliver messages or import mailboxes
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mdirs(1) to find Maildirs
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mflag(1) to change flags (marks) of mail
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mhdr(1) to extract mail headers
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minc(1) to incorporate new mail
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mless(1) to conveniently read mail in less(1)
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mlist(1) to list and filter mail messages
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mmime(1) to create MIME messages
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mrepl(1) to reply to mail
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mscan(1) to generate single line summaries of mail
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mseq(1) to manipulate mail sequences
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mshow(1) to render mail and extract attachments
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msort(1) to sort mail
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mthread(1) to arrange mail into discussions
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PRINCIPLES
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Santoku is a classic command line MUA with no features related to
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receiving and transferring mail. You are expected to fetch your mail
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using offlineimap(1), fdm(1), procmail(1), getmail(1) or similar and send
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it using sendmail(8), as provided by OpenSMTPD, Postfix, msmtp(1), dma(8)
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or similar. Santoku expects your mail to reside in Maildir folders.
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Santoku operates directly on Maildir and doesn't use caches or database.
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There is no setup needed for many uses. All tools have been written with
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performance in mind. Enumeration of all mails in a Maildir is avoided
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unless necessary, and then optimized to use few syscalls. Parsing mail
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metadata is optimized to use few I/O requests. Initial operations on big
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Maildir may feel slow, but as soon as they are in cache, everything is
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blazing fast. The tools are written to be memory efficient (i.e. not
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wasteful), but whole messages are assumed to fit into RAM easily (at a
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time).
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Santoku has been written from scratch and tested on a big pile of
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personal mail, but is not actually 100% RFC conforming (which is neither
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worth it nor desirable). There may be issues with very old,
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nonconforming, messages.
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Santoku is written in portable C, using only POSIX functions (apart from
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a tiny Linux-only optimization). It supports MIME and more than 7-bit
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messages (everything the host iconv(3) can decode). It assumes you work
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in a UTF-8 environment. Santoku works well together with other Unix mail
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tools such as offlineimap(1), mairix(1), or mu(1).
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EXAMPLES
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Santoku tools are designed to be composed together into a pipe. It is
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suitable for interactive use and for scripting. It integrates well into
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a Unix workflow.
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For example, you could decide you want to look at all unseen mail in your
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INBOX, oldest first.
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mlist -s ~/Maildir/INBOX | msort -d | mscan
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To operate on a set of mails in multiple steps, you can save a list of
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mail as a sequence. E.g. add a call to ‘mseq -S’ to above command:
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mlist -s ~/Maildir/INBOX | msort -d | mseq -S | mscan
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Now mscan will show message numbers and you could look at the first five
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mails at once, for example:
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mshow 1:5
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Likewise, you could decide to look at all freshly received mail in all
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folders, thread it and look at it interactively:
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mdirs ~/Maildir | xargs minc | mthread | mless
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Or you could look at the attachments of the 20 largest mails in your
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INBOX:
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mlist ~/Maildir/INBOX | msort -s | tail -20 | mshow -t
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Or apply the patches from the current mail:
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mshow -O. '*.diff' | patch
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As usual with pipes, the sky is the limit.
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CONCEPTS
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Santoku deals with messages (which are files), folders (which are Maildir
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folders), sequences (which are newline-separated lists of messages,
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possibly persisted on disk in ~/.santoku/seq), and the current message
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(kept as a symlink in ~/.santoku/cur).
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Messages in the persisted sequence can be referred to using special
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syntax as explained in mmsg(7).
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Many utilities have a default behavior when used interactively from a
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terminal (e.g. operate on the current message or the current sequence).
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For scripting, you must make these arguments explicit.
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SEE ALSO
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mailx(1), nmh(7)
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AUTHORS
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Christian Neukirchen <chneukirchen@gmail.com>
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LICENSE
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Santoku is in the public domain.
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To the extent possible under law, the creator of this work has waived all
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copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.
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http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
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Void Linux July 22, 2016 Void Linux
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