Given the enormous amounts of e-mail many people gather and the importance of e-mail message in our work-flows, it’s essential to quickly deal with all that mail - in particular, to instantly find that one important e-mail you need right now.

mu is a tool for dealing with e-mail messages stored in the Maildir-format. mu’s purpose in life is to help you to quickly find the messages you need; in addition, it allows you to view messages, extract attachments, create new maildirs, and so on. See the mu cheatsheet for some examples. mu is fully documented.

After indexing your messages into a Xapian-database, you can search them using a custom query language. You can use various message fields or words in the body text to find the right messages.

Built on top of the mu, are some extensions (included in this package):

• mu-for-emacs (mu4e): a full-featured e-mail client that runs inside emacs
• mu-guile: bindings for the Guile/Scheme programming language (version 2.0 and later)
• a toy GTK+-interface called ‘mug’ (in the ‘toys/’ subdir)

mu is written in C and a bit of C++ (to interface with Xapian), with mu4e written in Emacs-Lisp and mu-guile in a mix of C and Scheme.

Note, mu is available in Debian/Ubuntu under the name maildir-utils; apparently because they don’t like short name. It’s also possible to confuse that name with the GNU Mailutils project (which is totally unrelated) - but now you have been warned.