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171 lines
4.7 KiB
Groff
171 lines
4.7 KiB
Groff
.Dd July 22, 2016
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.Dt MBLAZE 7
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.Os
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.Sh NAME
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.Nm mblaze
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.Nd introduction to mblaze
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.Sh DESCRIPTION
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The
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.Nm
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message system is a set of Unix utilities to deal with
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mail kept in Maildir folders.
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.Pp
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Its design is roughly inspired by MH, the RAND Message Handling
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System, but its is a complete implementation from scratch.
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.Pp
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.Nm
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consists of a set of Unix tools that each do one job:
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.Bl -tag -width 11n -compact
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.It Xr maddr 1
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to extract addresses from mail
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.It Xr magrep 1
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to find mails matching a pattern
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.It Xr mcom 1
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to write and send mail
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.It Xr mdeliver 1
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to deliver messages or import mailboxes
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.It Xr mdirs 1
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to find Maildirs
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.It Xr mflag 1
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to change flags (marks) of mail
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.It Xr mgenmid 1
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to generate Message-IDs
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.It Xr mhdr 1
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to extract mail headers
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.It Xr minc 1
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to incorporate new mail
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.It Xr mless 1
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to conveniently read mail in
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.Xr less 1
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.It Xr mlist 1
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to list and filter mail messages
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.It Xr mmime 1
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to create MIME messages
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.It Xr mpick 1
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to filter mail
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.It Xr mrep 1
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to reply to mail
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.It Xr mscan 1
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to generate single line summaries of mail
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.It Xr msed 1
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to manipulate mail headers
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.It Xr mseq 1
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to manipulate mail sequences
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.It Xr mshow 1
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to render mail and extract attachments
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.It Xr msort 1
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to sort mail
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.It Xr mthread 1
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to arrange mail into discussions
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.El
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.Sh PRINCIPLES
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.Nm
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is a classic command line MUA with no features related to receiving
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and transferring mail.
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You are expected to fetch your mail using
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.Xr offlineimap 1 ,
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.Xr fdm 1 ,
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.Xr procmail 1 ,
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.Xr getmail 1
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or similar
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and send it using
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.Xr sendmail 8 ,
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as provided by
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OpenSMTPD,
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Postfix,
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.Xr msmtp 1 ,
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.Xr dma 8
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or similar.
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.Nm
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expects your mail to reside in Maildir folders.
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.Pp
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.Nm
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operates directly on Maildir and doesn't use caches or database.
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There is no setup needed for many uses.
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All tools have been written with performance in mind.
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Enumeration of all mails in a Maildir is avoided unless necessary,
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and then optimized to use few syscalls.
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Parsing mail metadata is optimized to use few I/O requests.
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Initial operations on big Maildir may feel slow, but as soon as they
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are in cache, everything is blazing fast.
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The tools are written to be memory efficient (i.e. not wasteful), but
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whole messages are assumed to fit into RAM easily (at a time).
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.Pp
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.Nm
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has been written from scratch and tested on a big pile of personal mail,
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but is not actually 100% RFC conforming
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(which is neither worth it nor desirable).
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There may be issues with very old, nonconforming, messages.
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.Pp
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.Nm
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is written in portable C, using only POSIX functions (apart from a tiny
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Linux-only optimization),
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and has no external dependencies.
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It supports MIME and more than 7-bit messages (everything the host
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.Xr iconv 3
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can decode).
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It assumes you work in a UTF-8 environment.
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.Nm
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works well together with other Unix mail tools such as
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.Xr offlineimap 1 ,
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.Xr mairix 1 ,
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or
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.Xr mu 1 .
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.Sh EXAMPLES
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.Nm
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tools are designed to be composed together into a pipe.
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It is suitable for interactive use and for scripting.
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It integrates well into a Unix workflow.
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.Pp
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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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.Dl 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 mail
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as a sequence.
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E.g. add a call to
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.Ql mseq -S
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to above command:
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.Dl 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
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five mails at once, for example:
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.Dl 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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.Dl mdirs ~/Maildir | xargs minc | mthread | mless
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Or you could look at the attachments of the 20 largest mails in your INBOX:
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.Dl 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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.Dl mshow -O . '*.diff' | patch
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As usual with pipes, the sky is the limit.
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.Sh CONCEPTS
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.Nm
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deals with messages (which are files),
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folders (which are Maildir folders),
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sequences (which are newline-separated lists of messages, possibly persisted on disk in
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.Pa ~/.mblaze/seq ) ,
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and the current message (kept as a symlink in
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.Pa ~/.mblaze/cur ) .
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.Pp
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Messages in the persisted sequence can be referred to using special
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syntax as explained in
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.Xr mmsg 7 .
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.Pp
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Many utilities have a default behavior when used interactively from a terminal
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(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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.Sh SEE ALSO
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.Xr mailx 1 ,
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.Xr nmh 7
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.Sh AUTHORS
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.An Christian Neukirchen Aq Mt chneukirchen@gmail.com
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.Sh LICENSE
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.Nm
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is in the public domain.
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.Pp
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To the extent possible under law,
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the creator of this work
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has waived all copyright and related or
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neighboring rights to this work.
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.Pp
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.Lk http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
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