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 it is a complete implementation from scratch.

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

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

     mblaze operates directly on Maildir folders and doesn't use its 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 limit
     syscalls.  Parsing mail 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 tools
     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 tested on a large corpus 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 mairix(1), mu(1), or
     offlineimap(1).

EXAMPLES
     mblaze tools 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 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 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
     mails at once, for example:
           mshow 1:5

     Likewise, you could decide to incorporate (by moving from new to cur) all
     new mail 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 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 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 mail to mblaze+subscribe@googlegroups.com.  Please
     report security-related bugs directly to the author), as well as an IRC
     channel #vuxu on irc.freenode.net.

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                       June 30, 2017                      Void Linux