3.3 Bookmarks and Maildirs ¶

The next two items in the Main view are Bookmarks and Maildirs.

Bookmarks are predefined queries with a descriptive name and a shortcut. In the example above, we see the default bookmarks. You can pick a bookmark by pressing b followed by the specific bookmark’s shortcut. If you want to edit the bookmarked query before invoking it, use B.

Next to each bookmark are some numbers that indicate the unread(delta)/all matching messages for the given query, with the delta being the difference in unread count since some “baseline”, and only shown when this delta > 0.

Note that the “delta” has its limitations: if you, for instance, deleted 5 messages and received 5 new one, the “delta” would be 0, although there were changes indeed. So it is mostly useful for tracking changes while you are not using mu4e. For this reason, you can reset the baseline manually, e.g. by visiting the main view.

Furthermore, for speed reasons, the counts do not exclude messages that no longer exist in the file-system, nor do they exclude duplicate messages.

By comparing current results with the baseline, you can quickly see what new messages have arrived since the last time you looked.

The baseline⁵ is reset automatically when switching to the main view, or invoking buffer-revert (g) while in the main-view. Visiting the “favorite” bookmark does the same(explained below).

Bookmarks are stored in the variable mu4e-bookmarks; you can add your own and/or replace the default ones; See Bookmarks. For instance:

(add-to-list 'mu4e-bookmarks
  ;; add bookmark for recent messages on the Mu mailing list.
  '( :name "Mu7Days"
     :key  ?m
     :query "list:mu-discuss.googlegroups.com AND date:7d..now"))

There are optional keys :hide to hide the bookmark or maildirs from the main menu, but still have it available (using b)), and :hide-if-no-unread to hide it if there are no unread messages.

To customize the display, there is also :hide-unread to avoid generating the unread-number; that can be useful if you have bookmarks for slow queries. Note that :hide-unread is implied when the query is not a string; this for the common case where the query function involves some user input, which would be disruptive in this case.

There is also the optional :favorite property, which at most one bookmark should have; this bookmark is highlighted in the main view, and its unread-status is shown in the modeline; See Modeline, and you can enable desktop notifications; See Desktop notifications. We’d recommend creating such a “favorite”, which should match message that require your quick attention:

(add-to-list 'mu4e-bookmarks
  ;; bookmark for message that require quick attention
  '( :name "Urgent"
     :key  ?u
     :query "maildir:/inbox AND from:boss@example.com"))

Note that mu4e resets the baseline when you are interacting with it (for instance, when you visit the urgent bookmark, or when you go to the main view); in such cases, there won’t be any further notifications.

The Maildirs item is very similar to Bookmarks – consider maildirs here as being a special kind of bookmark query that matches a Maildir. You can configure this using the variable mu4e-maildir-shortcuts; see its docstring and Maildir searches for more details.

When you ask for bookmarks or maildirs through mu4e-ask-bookmark, mu4e-ask-maildir, the counts are displayed in the (default) completions next to the maildir or bookmark entry. This is a shorter version of the full display, just showing either the delta or the number of unread messages, if any. If you do not want to see these counts, set mu4e-hide-short-counts to non-nil.