Earlier, the command F s (mh-search) was introduced which
helps you find messages that lie buried in your folders
(see Folders). This chapter covers this command in more detail.
Several commands are used to compose the search criteria and to start
searching. A couple of them can be found in the ‘Search’ menu.
Display cheat sheet for the MH-E commands (mh-help).
Find messages using mh-search-program
(mh-index-do-search).
Find messages using pick (mh-pick-do-search).
Display cheat sheet for the MH-E commands (mh-help).
Move to ‘Mail-Reply-To:’ header field (mh-to-field).
Move to ‘Bcc:’ header field (mh-to-field).
Move to ‘Cc:’ header field (mh-to-field).
Move to ‘Dcc:’ header field (mh-to-field).
Move to ‘Fcc:’ header field (mh-to-field).
Move to ‘Mail-Followup-To:’ header field (mh-to-field).
Move to ‘From:’ header field (mh-to-field).
Move to ‘Reply-To:’ header field (mh-to-field).
Move to ‘Subject:’ header field (mh-to-field).
Move to ‘To:’ header field (mh-to-field).
Another few commands are available in the MH-Folder buffer resulting from a search.
Jump to the next folder marker (mh-index-next-folder).
Jump to the previous folder marker (mh-index-previous-folder).
Visit original folder from where the message at point was found
(mh-index-visit-folder).
There is one option from the ‘mh-search’ customization group used in searching.
mh-search-program
Search program that MH-E shall use (default: ‘Auto-detect’).
The following hook is available.
mh-search-mode-hook
Hook run upon entry to mh-search-mode (default: nil).
The following face is available.
mh-search-folder
Folder heading face in MH-Folder buffers created by searches.
The command F s (mh-search-folder) helps you find
messages in your entire corpus of mail. You can search for messages to
or from a particular person or about a particular subject. In fact,
you can also search for messages containing selected strings in any
arbitrary header field or any string found within the messages.
Out of the box, MH-E uses pick to find messages. With a
little extra effort, you can set an indexing program which rewards you
with extremely quick results. The drawback is that sometimes the index
does not contain the words you’re looking for. You can still use
pick in these situations.
You are prompted for the folder to search. This can be ‘all’ to search all folders. Note that the search works recursively on the listed folder.
Next, an MH-Search buffer appears where you can enter search criteria.
From: To: Cc: Date: Subject: -------- # --:** search-pattern All L7 (MH-Search)--------------------------- Type C-c C-c to search messages, C-c C-p to use pick, C-c ? for help |
Search window
Edit this template by entering your search criteria in an appropriate header field that is already there, or create a new field yourself. If the string you’re looking for could be anywhere in a message, then place the string underneath the row of dashes.
As an example, let’s say that we want to find messages from Ginnean about horseback riding in the Kosciusko National Park (Australia) during January, 1994. Normally we would start with a broad search and narrow it down if necessary to produce a manageable amount of data, but we’ll cut to the chase and create a fairly restrictive set of criteria as follows:
From: ginnean To: Cc: Date: Jan 1994 Subject: -------- horse kosciusko
As with MH-Letter mode, MH-Search provides commands like C-c C-f
C-t (mh-to-field) to help you fill in the blanks.
See Editing Message.
If you find that you do the same thing over and over when editing the
search template, you may wish to bind some shortcuts to keys. This can
be done with the variable mh-search-mode-hook, which is called
when F s is run on a new pattern.
To perform the search, type C-c C-c (mh-index-do-search).
Sometimes you’re searching for text that is either not indexed, or
hasn’t been indexed yet. In this case you can override the default
method with the pick method by running the command C-c C-p
(mh-pick-do-search).
The messages that are found are put in a temporary sub-folder of
‘+mhe-index’ and are displayed in an MH-Folder buffer. This
buffer is special because it displays messages from multiple folders;
each set of messages from a given folder has a heading with the folder
name. The appearance of the heading can be modified by customizing the
face mh-search-folder. You can jump back and forth between the
headings using the commands TAB
(mh-index-next-folder) and S-TAB
(mh-index-previous-folder).
In addition, the command v (mh-index-visit-folder) can be
used to visit the folder of the message at point. Initially, only the
messages that matched the search criteria are displayed in the folder.
While the temporary buffer has its own set of message numbers, the
actual messages numbers are shown in the visited folder. Thus, the
command v is useful to find the actual message number of an
interesting message, or to view surrounding messages with the command
F r mh-rescan-folder. See Folders.
Because this folder is temporary, you’ll probably get in the habit of
killing it when you’re done with F k (mh-kill-folder).
See Folders.
You can regenerate the results by running F s with a prefix argument.
Note: This command uses an ‘X-MHE-Checksum:’ header field to
cache the MD5 checksum of a message. This means that if an incoming
message already contains an ‘X-MHE-Checksum:’ field, that message
might not be found by this command. The following procmail
recipe avoids this problem by renaming the existing header field:
:0 wf | formail -R "X-MHE-Checksum" "X-Old-MHE-Checksum"
See Limits, for an alternative interface to searching.
The command F s (mh-search) runs the command defined by
the option mh-search-program. The default value is
‘Auto-detect’ which means that MH-E will automatically choose one
of swish++, swish-e, mairix,
namazu, pick and grep in that order. If,
for example, you have both swish++ and mairix
installed and you want to use mairix, then you can set this
option to ‘mairix’.
The following sub-sections describe how to set up the various indexing programs to use with MH-E.
In the examples below, replace /home/user/Mail with the path to your MH directory.
First create the directory /home/user/Mail/.swish++. Then create the file /home/user/Mail/.swish++/swish++.conf with the following contents:
IncludeMeta Bcc Cc Comments Content-Description From Keywords IncludeMeta Newsgroups Resent-To Subject To IncludeMeta Message-Id References In-Reply-To IncludeFile Mail * IndexFile /home/user/Mail/.swish++/swish++.index
Use the following command line to generate the swish index. Run this daily from cron:
find /home/user/Mail -path /home/user/Mail/mhe-index -prune \
-o -path /home/user/Mail/.swish++ -prune \
-o -name "[0-9]*" -print \
| index -c /home/user/Mail/.swish++/swish++.conf -
This command does not index the folders that hold the results of your searches in ‘+mhe-index’ since they tend to be ephemeral and the original messages are indexed anyway.
On some systems (Debian GNU/Linux, for example), use index++
instead of index.
In the examples below, replace /home/user/Mail with the path to your MH directory.
First create the directory /home/user/Mail/.swish. Then create the file /home/user/Mail/.swish/config with the following contents:
DefaultContents TXT* IndexDir /home/user/Mail IndexFile /home/user/Mail/.swish/index IndexName "Mail Index" IndexDescription "Mail Index" IndexPointer "https://nowhere" IndexAdmin "nobody" #MetaNames automatic IndexReport 3 FollowSymLinks no UseStemming no IgnoreTotalWordCountWhenRanking yes WordCharacters abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789- BeginCharacters abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz EndCharacters abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789 IgnoreLimit 50 1000 IndexComments 0 FileRules filename contains \D FileRules pathname contains /home/user/Mail/.swish FileRules pathname contains /home/user/Mail/mhe-index FileRules filename is index
This configuration does not index the folders that hold the results of your searches in ‘+mhe-index’ since they tend to be ephemeral and the original messages are indexed anyway.
If there are any directories you would like to ignore, append lines like the following to config:
FileRules pathname contains /home/user/Mail/scripts
Use the following command line to generate the swish index. Run this daily from cron:
swish-e -c /home/user/Mail/.swish/config
In the examples below, replace ~/Mail with the path to your MH directory.
First create the directory ~/Mail/.mairix. Then create the file ~/Mail/.mairix/config with the following contents:
base=~/Mail # List of folders that should be indexed. 3 dots at the end means there # are subfolders within the folder mh=archive...:inbox:drafts:news:sent:trash mformat=mh database=~/Mail/.mairix/database
Use the following command line to generate the mairix index. Run this daily from cron:
mairix -f ~/Mail/.mairix/config
In the examples below, replace /home/user/Mail with the path to your MH directory.
First create the directory /home/user/Mail/.namazu. Then create the file /home/user/Mail/.namazu/mknmzrc with the following contents:
package conf; # Don't remove this line! $ADDRESS = 'user@localhost'; $ALLOW_FILE = "[0-9]*"; $EXCLUDE_PATH = "^/home/user/Mail/(mhe-index|spam)";
This configuration does not index the folders that hold the results of your searches in ‘+mhe-index’ since they tend to be ephemeral and the original messages are indexed anyway.
Use the following command line to generate the namazu index. Run this daily from cron:
mknmz -f /home/user/Mail/.namazu/mknmzrc -O /home/user/Mail/.namazu \
-q /home/user/Mail
This search method does not require any setup.
Read pick(1) or the section
Finding Messages with pick in
the MH book to find out more about how to enter the criteria.
This search method does not require any setup.
Unlike the other search methods, this method does not use the
MH-Search buffer. Instead, you simply enter a regular expression in
the minibuffer. For help in constructing regular expressions, see your
man page for grep.