mu-query - Man Page

The mu query language is the language used by mu find and mu4e to find messages in mu's Xapian database. The language is quite similar to Xapian's default query-parser, but is an independent implementation that is customized for the mu/mu4e use-case.

Here, we give a structured but informal overview of the query language and provide examples. As a companion to this, we recommend the mu fields and mu flags commands to get an up-to-date list of the available fields and flags.

Furthermore, mu find provides the --analyze option, which shows how mu interprets your query; see the ANALYZING QUERIES section below.

NOTE: if you use queries on the command-line (say, for mu find), you need to quote any characters that would otherwise be interpreted by the shell, such as "", ( and ) and whitespace.

The basic building blocks of a query are terms; these are just normal words like to just that field. See mu info fields for all the available fields.

Some example queries:

vacation
subject:capybara
maildir:/inbox

Terms without an explicit field-prefix, (like 'vacation' above) are interpreted like:

to:vacation or subject:vacation or body:vacation or ...

The language is case-insensitive for terms and attempts to 'flatten' diacritics, so angtrom matches Ångström.

If terms contain whitespace, they need to be quoted:

subject:"hi there"

This is a so-called phrase query, which means that we match against subjects that contain the literal phrase "hi there". Phrase queries only work for fields that are indexed, i.e., fields with index in the mu info fields search column.

Remember that you need to escape those quotes when using this from the command-line:

mu find subject:\"hi there\"

We can combine terms with logical operators -- binary ones: and, or, xor and the unary not, with the conventional rules for precedence and association. The operators are case-insensitive.

You can also group things with ( and ), so you can write:

(subject:beethoven or subject:bach) and not body:elvis

If you do not explicitly specify an operator between terms, and is implied, so the queries

subject:chip subject:dale

subject:chip AND subject:dale

are equivalent. For readability, we recommend the second version.

Note that a pure not - e.g. searching for not apples is quite a 'heavy' query.

The language supports matching basic PCRE regular expressions, see pcre(3).

Regular expressions are enclosed in //. Some examples:

subject:/h.llo/		# match hallo, hello, ...
subject:/

Note the difference between 'maildir:/foo' and 'maildir:/foo/'; the former matches messages in the '/foo' maildir, while the latter matches all messages in all maildirs that match 'foo', such as '/foo', '/bar/cuux/foo', '/fooishbar' etc.

Wildcards are another mechanism for matching where a term with a rightmost * (and only in that position) matches any term that starts with the part before the *; they are therefore less powerful than regular expressions, but also much faster:

foo*

is equivalent to

/foo.*/

Regular expressions can be useful, but are relatively slow.

We already saw a number of search fields, such as subject: and body:. For the full table with all details, including single-char shortcuts, try the command: mu info fields.

(*) The language code for the text-body if found. This works only if mu was built with CLD2 support.

There are also the special fields contact:, which matches all contact-fields (from, to, cc and bcc), and recip, which matches all recipient-fields (to, cc and bcc).

Hence, for instance,

contact:fnorb@example.com

is equivalent to

(from:fnorb@example.com or to:fnorb@example.com or
      cc:from:fnorb@example.com or bcc:fnorb@example.com)

The date: field takes a date-range, expressed as the lower and upper bound, separated by ... Either lower or upper (but not both) can be omitted to create an open range.

Dates are expressed in local time and using ISO-8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS); you can leave out the right part and mu adds the rest, depending on whether this is the beginning or end of the range (e.g., as a lower bound, end of the year).

You can use '/' , '.', '-', ':' and 'T' to make dates more human-readable.

Some examples:

date:20170505..20170602
date:2017-05-05..2017-06-02
date:..2017-10-01T12:00
date:2015-06-01..
date:2016..2016

You can also use the special 'dates' now and today:

date:20170505..now
date:today..

Finally, you can use relative 'ago' times which express some time before now and consist of a number followed by a unit, with units s for seconds, M for minutes, h for hours, d for days, w for week, m for months and y for years. Some examples:

date:3m..
date:2017.01.01..5w

The size or z field allows you to match size ranges -- that is, match messages that have a byte-size within a certain range. Units (b (for bytes), K (for 1000 bytes) and M (for 1000 * 1000 bytes) are supported). Some examples:

size:10k..2m
size:10m..

The flag/g field allows you to match message flags. The following fields are available:

a,attach        Message with attachment
d,draft         Draft Message
f,flagged       Flagged
l,list          Mailing-list message
n,new           New message (in new/ Maildir)
p,passed        Passed ('Handled')
r,replied       Replied
s,seen          Seen
t,trashed       Marked for deletion
u,unread        new OR NOT seen
x,encrypted     Encrypted message
z,signed        Signed message

Some examples:

flag:attach
flag:replied
g:x

Encrypted messages may be signed as well, but this is only visible after decrypting and thus invisible to mu.

The message priority field (prio:) has three possible values: low, normal or high. For instance, to match high-priority messages:

prio:high

The Maildir field describes the directory path starting after the Maildir root directory, and before the /cur/ or /new/ part. So, for example, if there's a message with the file name ~/Maildir/lists/running/cur/1234.213:2,, you could find it (and all the other messages in that same maildir) with:

maildir:/lists/running

Note the starting ''. If you want to match mails in the 'root' maildir, you can do with a single '':

maildir:/

If you have maildirs (or any fields) that include spaces, you need to quote them, ie.

maildir:"/Sent Items"

And once again, note that when using the command-line, such queries must be quoted:

mu find 'maildir:"/Sent Items"'

Also note that you should not end the maildir with a /, or it can be misinterpreted as a regular expression term; see aforementioned.

Here are some simple examples of mu queries; you can make many more complicated queries using various logical operators, parentheses and so on, but in the author's experience, it's usually faster to find a message with a simple query just searching for some words.

Find all messages with both 'bee' and 'bird' (in any field)

bee AND bird

Find all messages with either Frodo or Sam:

Frodo OR Sam

Find all messages with the 'wombat' as subject, and 'capybara' anywhere:

subject:wombat and capybara

Find all messages in the 'Archive' folder from Fred:

from:fred and maildir:/Archive

Find all unread messages with attachments:

flag:attach and flag:unread

Find all messages with PDF-attachments:

mime:application/pdf

Find all messages with attached images:

mime:image/*

Find all messages written in Dutch or German with the word 'hallo':

hallo and (lang:nl or lang:de)

This is only available if your mu has support for this; see mu info and check for "cld2-support*.

Despite all the excellent documentation, in some cases it can be non-obvious how mu interprets your query. For that, you can ask mu to analyze the query -- that is, show how mu interprets the query.

This uses the the --analyze option to mu find. #+begin_example $ mu find subject:wombat AND date:3m.. size:..2000  --analyze

subject:wombat AND date:3m.. size:..2000

(and (subject "wombat") (date (range "2023-05-30T06:10:09Z" "")) (size (range "" "2000")))

 Query((Swombat AND VALUE_GE 4 n64759341 AND VALUE_LE 17 i7d0)) #+end_example

The parsed query is usually the most useful one for understanding how mu interprets your query.

Please report bugs at https://github.com/djcb/mu/issues.

Dirk-Jan C. Binnema <djcb@djcbsoftware.nl>

This manpage is part of mu 1.12.1.

Copyright © 2008-2024 Dirk-Jan C. Binnema. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html. This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

mu-find(1), mu-info(1), *pcre(3)

mu(1), mu-find(1).