2.6 Indexing your messages

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.