Welcome to mu!

With the enormous amounts of e-mail many people gather and the importance of e-mail messages in our daily work-flow, it is very important to be able to quickly deal with all that - in particular, to instantly find that one important e-mail you need right now.

For that, mu was created. mu is a tool for dealing with e-mail messages stored in the Maildir-format, on Unix-like systems. mu’s main purpose is to help you to find the messages you need, quickly; in addition, it allows you to view messages, extract attachments, create new maildirs, … See the mu cheatsheet for some examples. Mu’s source code is available in github, and there is the mu-discuss mailing list.

mu includes an emacs-based e-mail client (mu4e), a simple GUI (mug) and bindings for the Guile/Scheme programming language.

Features

• fast indexing for Maildir, Maildir+ and Maildir-on-VFAT
• search for messages based on the sender, receiver, subject, date-range, size, priority, words in message, flags (signed, encrypted, new, replied, has-attachment,…), message-id, maildir, tags, attachment (name, mime-type, text) and more
• support for encrypted and signed messages
• command-line tools for indexing, searching, viewing, adding/removing messages, extracting attachments, exporting/searching address lists, creating maildirs, …
• accent/case normalization - so angstrom matches Ångström
• search based on human language
• can be integrated with other e-mail clients such as mutt and Wanderlust.
• mu4e, an emacs-based e-mail client based on mu (see screenshot).
• mu-guile: guile 2.0 bindings that allow for scripting, advanced processing of your data, and doing all kinds of statistics
• fully documented (man pages, info pages)

News

2024-02-24: mu/mu4e 1.12 is available

A new release is available; release notes and grab the tarball (latest 1.12 release).

2023-03-26: mu/mu4e 1.10 is available

A new release is available; release notes and grab the tarball (latest 1.10 release).

2022-06-25: mu/mu4e 1.8 is available

A new release is available; release notes and grab the tarball (latest 1.8.x release).

2021-07-27: mu/mu4e 1.6 is available

A new release is available; release notes and grab the tarball (latest 1.6.x release).

2020-04-18: mu/mu4e 1.4 is available

A new release is available; release notes and grab the tarball (latest 1.4.x release).

2019-04-07: mu/mu4e 1.2 is available

A new release is available; grab the tarball.

2018-02-03: mu/mu4e 1.0 is available

After a decade of development, mu 1.0 is available. Read NEWS with all the details.

2016-12-05: mu/mu4e 0.9.18 is available

mu 0.9.18 offers a number of improvements across the board. For example, people with huge maildirs can use a special “lazy-checking” mode to speed up indexing; it’s now possible to view rich-text message in an embedded webkit-view, and the release adds support for org-mode 9.x. There also many small fixes and tweaks in mu4e, all based on user-feedback.

For all the details, see: NEWS.org.

Get it from the Release page.

2016-01-21: mu/mu4e 0.9.16 is here, and it is our latest stable release!

Better behaviour and context handling

• Context Handling just got smart: new ‘mu4e-context’ defines and switches between various contexts, which are groups of settings. This may be used for instance to easily configure and switch between multiple accounts.
• Improved behaviour in html and messages marks: ability to toggle between html and text display of messages & better management of messages marked as read or unread.

User Interface improvements

• Numerous improvements in threads view and mailing lists management
• Fancy characters can now be properly used as well as special customizations for message views

Faster Indexing and message management

• Indexing & caching optimizations

You can grab the tarball directly from Github or wait a bit to get it through your distribution channels (details may vary from one distribution to another).

None of this would be possible without a team of dedicated individuals: Adam Sampson, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Bar Shirtcliff, Charles-H. Schulz, Clément Pit–Claudel, Damien Cassou, Declan Qian, Dima Kogan, Dirk-Jan C. Binnema, Foivos, Foivos S. Zakkak, Hinrik Örn Sigurðsson, jeroen tiebout, JJ Asghar, Jonas Bernoulli, Jun Hao, Martin Yrjölä, Maximilian Matthé, Piotr Trojanek, prsarv, Thierry Volpiatto, Titus von der Malsburg (and of course all people who reported issues, provided suggestions etc.)

We hope you will enjoy this release as much as we do. Happy Hacking!

– The mu/mu4e Team

Old News

• 2015-09-24: After almost 6 months, a new release of mu/mu4e. We are happy to announce mu and mu4e 0.9.9.13! have just been released. The following key features and improvements have been added:

• Change the way the headers are displayed and sorted
• Fancy characters now enabled distinctively both for marks and headers
• Composing a message is now possible in a separate frame
• Ability to display the subject of a thread only on top of it for enhanced clarity

• Lots of bugs squashed, updates to the documentation (BDDB), as well as embedding the News file inside mu4e itself.

• 2013-03-30: released mu-0.9.9.5; full with new features and bug fixes – see the download link for some of the details. Many thanks to all who contributed!
• 2012-10-14: released mu-0.9.9; a new barrage of fixes and improvements – check the link and NEWS. Also, note the mu4e-manual (PDF).
• 2012-07-01: released mu-0.9.8.5; more fixes, improvements (see the link).
• 2012-05-08: released mu-0.9.8.4 with even more improvements (the link has all the details)
• 2012-04-06: released mu-0.9.8.3, with many improvements, fixes. See the link for details. NOTE: existing mu and mu4e users are recommended to execute mu index --rebuild after installation.
• 2012-03-11: released mu-0.9.8.2, with a number of fixes and improvements, see the link for the details.
• 2012-02-17: released mu-0.9.8.1, which has a number of improvements to the 0.9.8 release: add mark as read/unread, colorize cited message parts, better handling of text-based message parts, documentation fixes, documentation updates and a few fixes here and there
• 2012-02-09: moved the mu source code repository to Github.
• 2012-01-31: finally, mu-0.9.8 is available. It comes with an emacs-based e-mail client, mu4e, and much improved guile bindings. Furthermore, It adds search for attachment mime type and search inside any text part of a message, more tests, improvements in many parts of the code.

• 2011-09-03: mu 0.9.7 is now available; compared to the -pre version there are a few small changes; the most important one is a fix specifically for running mu on MacOS.

• Old news

Development & download

Some Linux-distributions already provide pre-built mu packages; if there’s no packagage for your distribution, or if you want the latest release, you can download mu source packages from Google Code. In case you find a bug, or have a feature requests, please use the issue tracker.

If you’d like to work with the mu source code, you can find it in Github; also, see the notes on HACKING the mu source code.

There’s also a mailing list.

License & Copyright

mu was designed and implemented by Dirk-Jan C. Binnema, and is Free Software, licensed under the GNU GPLv3