Mblaze is a set of tools by Leah Neukirchen that lets you treat email in the One True Unix way — as files of mostly textual data that you display, search and transform with shell commands, connected with pipes. It works well with email stored in Maildir format, where each email is stored as an individual file in directories that represent email folders.

Notmuch is a separate project for indexing and searching Maildirs that contain a lot of email. It lets you mark emails with tags like "inbox" or "important", and do full text searching of large email archives.

Mblaze-Much is a collection of command line tools and shell scripts to tie mblaze and notmuch together. It helps you triage hundreds of incoming emails and investigate millions of archived mails quickly via the command line.

If you're comfortable with Unix shell commands, and have ever been frustrated with GUI or TUI email clients like Thunderbird or Mutt because they don't let you treat your email as a pile of big, mungeable data, this setup might be for you.

Mblaze-much is currently a work in progress, but if you'd like to explore, here are some places to start:

mtags - a standalone C utility that takes a list of files, and outputs their notmuch tags.

mblaze_much.sh - a collection of useful shell functions, including:

mnm -- takes a notmuch search query and turns it into a list of files suitable for feeding to mblaze's mseq

mt -- takes a mblaze sequence and outputs all other email in the same thread found by notmuch

minbox -- creates an mblaze sequence of every email tagged 'inbox'

mtoday -- creates an mblaze sequence of recent email tagged 'inbox'

mbatchtag -- add or remove tag on an mblaze sequence

march -- changes the tags on a sequence so that it is no longer tagged inbox, and is tagged for archiving

mspam -- changes the tags on a sequence so that it is no longer tagged inbox, and is tagged as spam

mid -- output the message IDs of an mblaze sequence

examples/muchless - mblaze's mless, adapted to show tags and archive or mark emails as spam

examples/muchlesskey.notmuch - keybindings for muchless

If you're craving more documentation, mtags and mnm have man pages, found in man.