MU QUERY(7)

NAME

mu-query - a language for finding messages in mu databases.

DESCRIPTION

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 info fields command 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; similarly, mu4e has a command. mu4e-analyze-last-query. See the ANALYZING QUERIES section for further details.

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 `)'. The details are shell-specific. In case of doubt, the --analyze option can be useful.

TERMS

The basic building blocks of a query are terms; these are just normal words like "banana" or "hello", or words prefixed with a field-name which makes them apply 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 as:

    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 certain fields; they have the word phrase in their mu info fields search column.

  Quoting queries for the shell

Remember that you need to escape the quotes for a search query when using this from the command-line; otherwise, the shell (or most shells) processes the queries and mu never sees them.

In this case, that means the difference between searching for a subject "hi there" versus a subject "hi" and some word "there" that can appear in any of the combination fields for <empty> (combination fields are discussed below).

We can use the mentioned --analyze option to show the difference:

#+begin_example mu find subject:"hi there" --analyze

query:

subject:hi there

parsed query:

(and (subject "hi") (_ "there"))

parsed query (expanded):

(and (subject "hi") (or (to "there") (cc "there") (bcc "there") (from "there") (subject "there") (body "there") (embed "there")))

Xapian query:

  Query((Shi AND (Tthere OR Cthere OR Hthere OR Fthere OR Sthere OR Bthere OR Ethere))) #+end_example

And with quotes escaped:

#+begin_example mu find subject:$

query:

subject:"hi there"

parsed query:

(or (subject "hi there") (subject (phrase "hi there")))

Xapian query:

  Query((Shi there OR (Shi PHRASE 2 Sthere))) #+end_example

We won't dwell on the details of the --analyze output here, but hopefully this illustrates the difference between quoted and unquoted queries.

LOGICAL OPERATORS

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 these queries are equivalent:
    subject:chip subject:dale

    subject:chip AND subject:dale

For readability, we recommend the second version.

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

WILDCARDS

Wildcards are a Xapian built-in mechanism for matching.

A search term with a rightmost * (and only in that position) matches any term that starts with the part before the *; they are less powerful than regular expressions, but also much faster:

An example:
    $ mu find "hello*"

Quoting the "hello*" is recommended; some shells (but not all) would otherwise expand the `*' to all files in the current directory.

REGULAR EXPRESSIONS

The query language supports matching basic PCRE regular expressions, as per pcre(3), with some limitations.

Regular expressions are enclosed in //. For example:

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

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", and so on.

Regular expressions are more powerful than wildcards, but are also much slower. Moreover, their behavior in mu can be a bit confusing, due to some implementation details. See below for some of the caveats.

  Whitespace in regular expression literals

To avoid ambiguities in the query parsing, regular expressions must not contain whitespace, so to search for a message with subject "hello world", you can write
    mu find 'subject:/hello\\040world/'

(with the \040 specifying a space in the regular expression, and and extra `\' to escape it). In many cases,
    mu find 'subject:/hello.world/'

may be good enough, and easier to type.

  Anchors in regular expressions

Since the underlying Xapian database does not support regular expressions (it does support wildcards), mu implements the regular expression search by matching the user's regular expression against all "terms" (words or phrases) that exist in the database for a given field.

That implementation detail explains why "anchored" regular expressions (with ^ and $ to mark begin/end, respectively) can get unexpected results.

Suppose you want to match all messages that start with "pie", and you search with subject:/^pie/. This also matches messages with subject "apple pie", since both those words are indexed as terms separately (as well as phrases), and thus "^pie" matches as well for a message with subject "apple pie".

FIELDS

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.

    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
    | field-name | alias     | short | search  | value | sexp | example query                 | description                      |
    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
    | bcc        |           | h     | phrase  | yes   | yes  | bcc:foo@example.com           | Blind carbon-copy recipient      |
    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
    | body       |           | b     | phrase  | no    | no   | body:capybara                 | Message plain-text body          |
    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
    | cc         |           | c     | phrase  | yes   | yes  | cc:quinn@example.com          | Carbon-copy recipient            |
    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
    | changed    |           | k     | range   | yes   | yes  | changed:30M..                 | Last change time                 |
    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
    | date       |           | d     | range   | yes   | yes  | date:20220101..20220505       | Message date                     |
    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
    | embed      |           | e     | phrase  | no    | no   | embed:war OR embed:peace      | Embedded text                    |
    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
    | file       |           | j     | boolean | no    | no   | file:/image\.*.jpg/           | Attachment file name             |
    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
    | flags      | flag      | g     | boolean | yes   | yes  | flag:unread AND flag:personal | Message properties               |
    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
    | from       |           | f     | phrase  | yes   | yes  | from:jimbo                    | Message sender                   |
    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
    | language   | lang      | a     | boolean | yes   | yes  | lang:nl                       | ISO 639-1 language code for body |
    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
    | maildir    |           | m     | boolean | yes   | yes  | maildir:/private/archive      | Maildir path for message         |
    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
    | list       |           | v     | boolean | yes   | yes  | list:mu-discuss.example.com   | Mailing list (List-Id:)          |
    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
    | message-id | msgid     | i     | boolean | yes   | yes  | msgid:abc@123                 | Message-Id                       |
    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
    | mime       | mime-type | y     | boolean | no    | no   | mime:image/jpeg               | Attachment MIME-type             |
    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
    | path       |           | l     | boolean | yes   | yes  | path:/a/b/Maildir/cur/msg:2,S | File system path to message      |
    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
    | priority   | prio      | p     | boolean | yes   | yes  | prio:high                     | Priority                         |
    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
    | references | ref       | r     | boolean | yes   | yes  | ref:E1rQJDx123@example.com    | References to related messages   |
    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
    | size       |           | z     | range   | yes   | yes  | size:1M..5M                   | Message size in bytes            |
    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
    | subject    |           | s     | phrase  | yes   | yes  | subject:wombat                | Message subject                  |
    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
    | tags       | tag       | x     | boolean | yes   | yes  | tag:projectx                  | Message tags                     |
    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
    | thread     |           | w     | boolean | yes   | no   | thread:abcde789@example.com   | Thread a message belongs to      |
    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
    | to         |           | t     | phrase  | yes   | yes  | to:flimflam@example.com       | Message recipient                |
    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
    | labels     | label     | q     | boolean | yes   | yes  | label:projectx                | Message label(s)                 |
    +------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------+------+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+

There are also combination fields which allow you to search for multiple related fields at once:

    # Combination fields
    +-------------+-----------------------------------------+
    | combi-field | fields                                  |
    +-------------+-----------------------------------------+
    | recip       | to, cc, bcc                             |
    +-------------+-----------------------------------------+
    | contact     | to, cc, bcc, from                       |
    +-------------+-----------------------------------------+
    | related     | message-id, references                  |
    +-------------+-----------------------------------------+
    | <empty>     | to, cc, bcc, from, subject, body, embed |
    +-------------+-----------------------------------------+

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)

DATE RANGES

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, "2015" would be interpreted as the start of that year; as an upper bound as the 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

SIZE RANGES

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..

FLAG FIELD

The flag/g field allows you to match message flags. The following fields are available:
    +-----------+----------+----------+-----------------------------+
    | flag      | shortcut | category | description                 |
    +-----------+----------+----------+-----------------------------+
    | draft     | D        | file     | Draft (in progress)         |
    +-----------+----------+----------+-----------------------------+
    | flagged   | F        | file     | User-flagged                |
    +-----------+----------+----------+-----------------------------+
    | passed    | P        | file     | Forwarded message           |
    +-----------+----------+----------+-----------------------------+
    | replied   | R        | file     | Replied-to                  |
    +-----------+----------+----------+-----------------------------+
    | seen      | S        | file     | Viewed at least once        |
    +-----------+----------+----------+-----------------------------+
    | trashed   | T        | file     | Marked for deletion         |
    +-----------+----------+----------+-----------------------------+
    | new       | N        | maildir  | New message                 |
    +-----------+----------+----------+-----------------------------+
    | signed    | z        | content  | Cryptographically signed    |
    +-----------+----------+----------+-----------------------------+
    | encrypted | x        | content  | Encrypted                   |
    +-----------+----------+----------+-----------------------------+
    | attach    | a        | content  | Has at least one attachment |
    +-----------+----------+----------+-----------------------------+
    | unread    | u        | pseudo   | New or not seen message     |
    +-----------+----------+----------+-----------------------------+
    | list      | l        | content  | Mailing list message        |
    +-----------+----------+----------+-----------------------------+
    | personal  | q        | content  | Personal message            |
    +-----------+----------+----------+-----------------------------+
    | calendar  | c        | content  | Calendar invitation         |
    +-----------+----------+----------+-----------------------------+

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.

PRIORITY FIELD

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

MAILDIR

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, i.e.,
    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.

MORE EXAMPLES

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/*

(and beware that on the command-line, you need to put this in quotes or it would expand the *.

Find a messages with the given message-id:
    msgid:CAE56pjGU2oNxN-wWku69@mail.gmail.com

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*.

ANALZYING QUERIES

Despite all the excellent documentation, in some cases it can be non-obvious to understand how mu interprets your query, especially when shell interpretation is involved as well.

For that, you can ask mu to analyze the query -- that is, show how mu interprets the query. We already saw an example of this.

This uses the --analyze option to mu find.
    $ mu find subject:wombat AND date:3m.. size:..2000  --analyze
    *query:
      subject:wombat AND date:3m.. size:..2000
    * parsed query:
      (and (subject "wombat") (date (range "2023-05-30T06:10:09Z" "")) (size (range "" "2000")))
    * Xapian query:
      Query((Swombat AND VALUE_GE 4 n64759341 AND VALUE_LE 17 i7d0))

The parsed query is usually the most useful one for understanding how mu interprets your query; it shows the query as mu sees it, in s-expression notation.

In mu4e there is the mu4e-analyze-last-query command, which provides similar information.

REPORTING BUGS

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

AUTHOR

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

COPYRIGHT

This manpage is part of mu 1.12.14.

Copyright © 2008-2025 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.

SEE ALSO

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