mblaze/README

MBLAZE(7)              Miscellaneous Information Manual              MBLAZE(7)

NAME
     mblaze – introduction to mblaze

DESCRIPTION
     The mblaze message system is a set of Unix utilities to deal with mail
     kept in Maildir folders.

     Its design is roughly inspired by MH, the RAND Message Handling System,
     but its is a complete implementation from scratch.

     mblaze consists of a set of Unix tools that each do one job:
     maddr(1)     to extract addresses from mail
     magrep(1)    to find mails matching a pattern
     mcom(1)      to write and send mail
     mdeliver(1)  to deliver messages or import mailboxes
     mdirs(1)     to find Maildirs
     mexport(1)   to export mailboxes
     mflag(1)     to change flags (marks) of mail
     mgenmid(1)   to generate Message-IDs
     mhdr(1)      to extract mail headers
     minc(1)      to incorporate new mail
     mless(1)     to conveniently read mail in less(1)
     mlist(1)     to list and filter mail messages
     mmime(1)     to create MIME messages
     mpick(1)     to filter mail
     mrep(1)      to reply to mail
     mscan(1)     to generate single line summaries of mail
     msed(1)      to manipulate mail headers
     mseq(1)      to manipulate mail sequences
     mshow(1)     to render mail and extract attachments
     msort(1)     to sort mail
     mthread(1)   to arrange mail into discussions

PRINCIPLES
     mblaze is a classic command line MUA with no features related to
     receiving and transferring mail.  You are expected to fetch your mail
     using offlineimap(1), fdm(1), procmail(1), getmail(1) or similar and send
     it using sendmail(8), as provided by OpenSMTPD, Postfix, msmtp(1), dma(8)
     or similar.  mblaze expects your mail to reside in Maildir folders.

     mblaze operates directly on Maildir and doesn't use own caches or
     databases.  There is no setup needed for many uses.  All tools have been
     written with performance in mind.  Enumeration of all mails in a Maildir
     is avoided unless necessary, and then optimized to use few syscalls.
     Parsing mail metadata is optimized to use few I/O requests.  Initial
     operations on big Maildir may feel slow, but as soon as they are in file
     system cache, everything is blazing fast.  The tools are written to be
     memory efficient (i.e. not wasteful), but whole messages are assumed to
     fit into RAM easily (at a time).

     mblaze has been written from scratch and tested on a big pile of personal
     mail, but is not actually 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 together with other Unix mail tools such as offlineimap(1),
     mairix(1), or mu(1).

EXAMPLES
     mblaze tools are designed to be composed together into a pipe.  It is
     suitable for interactive use and for scripting.  It integrates well into
     a Unix workflow.

     For example, you could decide you want to look at all unseen mail in your
     INBOX, oldest first.
           mlist -s ~/Maildir/INBOX | msort -d | mscan
     To operate on a set of mails in multiple steps, you can save a list of
     mail as a sequence.  E.g. add a call to ‘mseq -S’ to 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
     mails at once, for example:
           mshow 1:5
     Likewise, you could decide to look at all freshly received mail in all
     folders, thread it and look at it interactively:
           mdirs ~/Maildir | xargs minc | mthread | mless
     Or you could look at the attachments of the 20 largest mails in your
     INBOX:
           mlist ~/Maildir/INBOX | msort -s | tail -20 | mshow -t
     Or apply the patches from the current mail:
           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 persisted on disk in ${MBLAZE:-$HOME/.mblaze}/seq), and the
     current message (kept as a symlink in ${MBLAZE:-$HOME/.mblaze}/cur).

     Messages in the persisted 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.

SEE ALSO
     mailx(1), nmh(7)

AUTHORS
     Leah Neukirchen <leah@vuxu.org>

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                       July 22, 2016                      Void Linux