#+TITLE:mu
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Welcome to ~mu~!

Latest development news: [[NEWS.org]].

With 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, and quickly file away message for later use.

~mu~ is a set of command-line tools for dealing with e-mail messages stored in the
Maildir-format. ~mu~'s goal is to help you to quickly find the messages you need,
view them, extract attachments, create new maildirs, and so on.

After indexing your messages into a [[http://www.xapian.org][Xapian]]-database, you can search them through
a query language. You can use various message fields or words in the body text
to find the right messages.

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

- ~mu4e~: a full-featured e-mail client that runs inside emacs

- ~mu-scm~: bindings for the Guile/Scheme programming language (version 3.0 and
  later)

~mu~ is written in C++; ~mu4e~ is written in ~elisp~ and ~mu-scm~ is written in a mix of
C++ and Scheme.

~mu~ is available in many Linux distributions (e.g. Debian/Ubuntu and Fedora)
under the name ~maildir-utils~; apparently because they don't like short names.
All of the code is distributed under the terms of the [[https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html][GNU General Public License
version 3]] (or higher).

* Versions

*mu* attempts to balance development speed and stability.

Active development takes place on ~master~ (the 1.14 series), and we maintain
~release/1.12~ as well. When possible, fixes (but not features) from ~master~ are
back-ported to ~release/1.12~.

Every few months, we release a stable version (e.g. ~1.14.0~); development then
continues in ~master~, with ~-pre<n>~ (e.g. ~1.14.1-pre1~): ~-pre~-suffixed versions
refer to the current _development_ code, until it is released (and then looses its
~-pre~ suffix, i.e., becomes the ~1.14.1~ release).

Hence, if you want to track active development, use ~master~; if you want to avoid
any changes except bug-fixes, use a 1.12 [[https://github.com/djcb/mu/releases/][release]]; otherwise, track ~master~.

Overall, we try to avoid incompatible changes, but sometimes this is necessary,
for example to update the versions of required libraries

* Installation

Note: building from source is an /advanced/ subject, especially if something goes
wrong. The below simple examples are a start, but all tools involved have many
options; there are differences between systems, versions etc. So if this is all
a bit daunting we recommend to wait for someone else to build it for you, such
as a Linux distribution. Many have packages available.

** Requirements

To be able to build ~mu~, ensure you have:

- a C++20 compiler (~gcc~ and ~clang~ are known to work)
- development packages for /Xapian/ and /GMime/ and /GLib/ (see ~meson.build~ for the
  versions)
- basic tools such as ~make~, ~sed~, ~grep~
- ~meson~

For ~mu4e~, you also need ~emacs~, version 28 or later.

Note, support for Windows is very much _experimental_, that is, it works for some
people, but we can't really support it due to lack of the specific expertise.
Help is welcome!

** Building

#+begin_example
$ git clone https://github.com/djcb/mu.git
$ cd mu
#+end_example

~mu~ uses ~meson~ for building, so you can use that directly, and all the usual
commands apply. You can also use it _indirectly_ through the provided ~Makefile~,
which provides a number of useful targets.

For instance, using the ~Makefile~, you could install ~mu~ using:

#+begin_example
$ ./autogen.sh && make
$ sudo make install
#+end_example

You can of course also run ~meson~ directly (see the ~meson~ documentation for more
details):
#+begin_example
$ meson setup build
$ meson compile -C build
$ meson install -C build
#+end_example

** Contributing

Contributions are welcome! See the Github issue list and [[IDEAS.org]].