After you have succeeded in Getting mail and initialized the message database, we need to index the messages. That is — we need to scan the messages in the maildir and store the information about them in a special database.
We can do that from mu4e — The main view, but the first time,
it is a good idea to run it from the command line, which makes it
easier to verify that everything works correctly.
Assuming that your maildir is at ~/Maildir, we issue the following command:
$ mu index
This should scan your messages and fill the database, and give progress information while doing so.
The indexing process may take a few minutes the first time you do it
(for thousands of e-mails); afterwards it is much faster, since mu
only scans messages that are new or have changed. Indexing is discussed
in full detail in the mu-index man-page.
After the indexing process has finished, you can quickly test if everything worked, by trying some command-line searches, for example
$ mu find hello
which lists all messages that match hello. For more examples of
searches, see Queries, or check the mu-find and mu-easy
man pages. If all of this worked well, we are well on our way setting
things up; the next step is to do some basic configuration for mu4e.