Using Mailpile

The most important command Mailpile supports is the search command. The second most important is probably help. :-)

All commands can be abbreviated to only their first character (the less commonly used commands use capital letters for this).

Searching

Some searching examples:

$ ./mp
mailpile> search bjarni einarsson
...
mailpile> search subject:bjarni
...
mailpile> search from:bjarni to:somebody
...
mailpile> search from:bjarni -from:pagekite
...
mailpile> search group:family -from:mom
...
mailpile> s att:pdf
...
mailpile> s has:attachment
...
mailpile> s date:2011-1-30 +date:2011-1-29
...
mailpile> s year:2011 month:12
...
mailpile> s dates:2011-12..2012-04-15
...
mailpile> s mailbox:path/fragment/or/filename
...

The default search will search in message bodies, from lines, attachment names and subjects. Using a to/from/subject/att/... prefix will search that part of the message only. There's no way to only search bodies, they're too full of crap anyway.

Adding terms narrows the search, unless the extra terms are prefixed with a +, then results are combined. Prefixing with - removes matches for that term instead.

You can paginate through results using next and previous.

To view a message, use the view command with the number of the result or one of the magic words all or these:

mailpile> search year:2011 month:12
...
mailpile> view 1 2 6
...

(Mailpile currently assumes you have less installed and in your path for viewing e-mail. This is a temporary hack.)

You can also search from the command line with mp -s term, but that will be a bit slower because the metadata index has to be loaded into RAM on each invocation.

Special search terms

Here is a brief list of the special search terms:

all:mail         All messages
att:<word>       Search within attachment file names
dates:<B>..<E>   Search dates from B to E
in:spam          Same as tag:Spam
in:trash         Same as tag:Trash
is:unread        Same as tag:New
group:<name>     Messages from people in a group
has:attachment   Messages with attachments
has:pgp          Messages with signed or encrypted content
togroup:<name>   Messages to people in a group

Sorting the results

The order command lets you sort results. Available sort orders are: index, random, date, from and subject. Threading may be disabled by prefixing the order with flat-, and the order may be reversed by further prefixing it with rev-. Examples:

mailpile> order rev-subject    # Reverse subject order
...
mailpile> order rev-flat-date  # Flat reverse date order
...
mailpile> order                # Default sort order
...

You can also change the default sort order by using the order setting:

mailpile> set order = rev-flat-date  # Change default order
...
mailpile> unset order                # Use program defaults
...

Tags and filters

Tags are a central concept in Mailpile's design and can denote status, context, importance and many other properties of your emails. For example Spam, Inbox and Document are implemented by tags. You can create your own tags in the Web GUI by clicking the Add button on the bottom left or via the command line :

mailpile> tags/add Important
Added tags: Important
mailpile> search from:Boss
  1  Boss   Important Meeting on Thursday           (Inbox)Wednesday
mailpile> tag +Important all
Tagged Important (1 conversation)
mailpile> Important
  1  Boss   Important Meeting on Thursday           (Inbox)Wednesday

The tag command accepts a single tag name, prefixed with a + or - (for adding or removing the tag), followed by a description of messages. The message description can be:

• all will affect all messages from the last search
• these will affect currently listed messages from the last search
• A list of numbers or ranges (1 2 3 5-10 15)

All these are relative to the last search, so 1 is the first result of the most recent search and all would be all matching messages.

Tags names are themselves recognized as specialized search commands in the mailpile CLI.

Tags come in two flavors: Attributes or categories. An email can have an arbitrary amount of attributes. Attributes can be used to implement concepts like todo, stars or flags from other email clients. Adding an attribute via the GUI to an email will not remove other attributes. On the other hand adding an email to a category via the GUI will remove other categories from this email.

Tags can also have a parent tag. Searches for the parent tag will automatically include all messages tagged with the child tag. If you have an 2010 tag with its parent tag Archive, searching for Archive will also find all emails tagged with 2010. The UI currently only supports one level of parent/child relationships.

If you want Mailpile to automatically tag (or untag) messages based on certain search criteria, you can use the filter command instead:

mailpile> tags/add Lists/Diaspora
...
mailpile> search list:diaspora
...
mailpile> filter +lists/diaspora -inbox Diaspora Mail
...

This will tag all the search results and then apply the same rules as new messages are received.

Filters are always processed in a fixed order, so even if one filter adds a tag, a subsequent one may remove it again. This allows you to define common patterns such as "All mail goes to the Inbox and is tagged as new, except this mailing list and that junk mail". Run the filter command on its own to get a brief summary of how to remove, edit or reorder the filters.