Email Search – How to Search for Mail Content with Mutt

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Is it possible in Mutt to search for specific mail content using built-in functionality? Or, as a last resort, how can I configure grep to be used in Mutt?

The documentation only mentions the search and limit functions, which only search headers.

Best Answer

search and limit can also actually search inside messages, depending on the search patterns you give. From the Patterns subsection of the Mutt reference:

~b EXPR         messages which contain EXPR in the message body
=b STRING       If IMAP is enabled, like ~b but searches for STRING on the server, rather than downloading each message and searching it locally.
~B EXPR         messages which contain EXPR in the whole message
=B STRING       If IMAP is enabled, like ~B but searches for STRING on the server, rather than downloading each message and searching it locally.

That is, ~b only searches in the body, whereas ~B also searches in the headers.

Note that this can be quite slow, since it may have to download each message one by one if they are not already cached. If you have a mutt version greater or equal to 1.5.12, you can cache the ones you are downloading for later use by setting message_cachedir to a directory where you want to store message bodies, which can significantly speed up searching them (and the same for headers with header_cache).

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