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leahneukirchen
mblaze
C2019–2024
leahneukirchen / mblaze

mblaze

Unix utilities to deal with Maildir

Systems & InfrastructureLibraries & SDKs
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
14Distinct people
23Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
512GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Unix utilities to deal with Maildir

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year23 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2019-06-04 08:38:42 UTC to 2024-12-09 16:37:25 UTC.

0123452019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 1 submissions, 4 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC514
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505

What Hacker News says

23 sources
codetrotter·Dec 9, 2024
No? Version 1.3 was tagged in the repo September 13 this year. https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze/tags And correspondingly of course that’s the version package repos have/will published too. For example, Alpine Linux has that version in a community package repo on a branch. https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/edge/community/x86/mbla... FreeBSD package repo is a little behind, still on v1.2 instead of v1.3. But that’s still a version from March of this year. https://www.freshports.org/mail/mblaze And even if the most recent release of mblaze really had been a few years ago, it could still be good software. Especially for email.
In Himalaya: CLI to Manage Emails
xelxebar·Aug 14, 2024
After trying a few different CLI mail clients---mutt/neomutt, s-nail, etc.---I've come to love the approach of mblaze[0], _i.e._ just a collection of commands to interact with maildirs, which can be separately managed by OfflineIMAP or whatever. I'm curious how mblaze+offlineimap compares to other similar setups: nmh[1], fdm[2], and getmail. [0]:https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze [1]:https://www.nongnu.org/nmh/ [2]:https://github.com/nicm/fdm
In Tmpmail: Temporary email right from your terminal written in POSIX sh
rakoo·May 23, 2024
> Search is a very different story, you wouldn't want to have to do a full directory scan for text based search. So some level of indexing would be useful for a client mail service. While notmuch and mu exist, I myself use the mblaze suite (https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze) and it's more than enough for me. As a totally unscientific benchmark, it takes 300 ms to find 7 mails out of 24k when searching in headers, 4 seconds when searching in the body. I myself use a different way: I convert the entire (all 24k of them) list of emails to 1-lines with Sender, Subject, Date, Folder and feed it to fzf which gives me preview as well. The search is then instant; on the given fields only, but I never need more than that. This is my full MUA: https://sr.ht/~rakoo/omail/
In M2dir: Treating mails as files without going crazy
readmemyrights·May 7, 2024
They don't usually count as TUIs, but there are some great CLI programs, even for interactive use. Perhaps the classic example beyond the usual is the MH mail handling system, which is still maintained as nmh [0]. Instead of a single monolith like thunderbird, mutt, or mailx, it consists of multiple commands that list mails, show them, let you compose new ones, etc, and keeps all intermediate state on the filesystem which makes it very easy to back up or do anything with using the usual file management commands. Mblaze [1] is a more modern implementation of a similar concept that uses amildirs, and it's how I interact with my emails these days. There are also programs that function more similar to "monoliths" but still act like a shell or repl as far as accepting commands and executing them. Clifm [2] is one example, it's the only file ma
Read the rest
nager I seriously tried using before giving up and returning to ls and friends. If you have vi or any of its discendents odds are you can run them in "ex" mode where you use them similar to the good old ed. Speaking of ed, edbrowse [3] is a browser with an ed-like interface that can also read mail (and no I'm not making it up. An interesting thing about it (well, at least one of them) is that one can define "functions" which are pretty similar to functions in sh. For example, this is a function to search something on searx: ``` function+gg { db0 b https://searx.be/ /<>/ i=~0 db1 /start search/i i2* /h1/ } ``` While this can certainly be done in a conventional browser using userscripts or such, I'd argue that this sort of function is easier to write because most of it is something you were doing already, and now you're just putting it in a shorthand, where in a userscript you'd probably have to use a lot of getElementById()s to do it, which besides being more verbose is very different to how you think about the problem. [0]: https://www.nongnu.org/nmh/ [1]: https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze [2]: https://leo-arch.github.io/clifm/ [3]: https://edbrowse.org/
In Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?
JNRowe·Dec 26, 2023
I'm so close to being a full-time mblaze user, it is truly excellent. There is something so smart about being able to use your standard shell tooling and interaction facilities to interact with mail. It is like everything that was a good idea with mh¹/nmh decades ago, just better all round and with a nicer message format. Even if you don't like the idea of using command line tools as your MUA, you can easily make mblaze interactive with common tooling. For example, you could use mlist via fzf along with its --preview window as pretty awesome interactive client. Everything works as you'd expect, and you have all the power of every single tool you use to mangle that mail at any point. I just seem to fall back in to mutt too easily in the end, I can't get over the final hump. I've even implemented a chunk of mimicry bindings so that I s
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houldn't even notice, but mutt pulls me back in for "that one tiny feature" every now and then. I've been doing this dance for at least a few years at this point², but I think it may be longer. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System ² https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze/commits?author=JNRo...
In Mblaze – Unix utilities to deal with Maildir
cubesnooper·Nov 18, 2022
I self‐host mostly because local copies of things give me some privacy (sites won’t know what my IP is searching for), and it also lets me work easily when Comcast is down… which is annoyingly frequent in my neighborhood. All of these machines are running OpenBSD, except the gaming machines and the HTPC. • Outgoing Email: OpenSMTPD, with mandatory TLS. Since I’m the only one sending email from my domain, the outgoing relay is hidden behind my LAN and my DKIM keys never leave my network. Outgoing mail gets routed via Wireguard through a VPS so it doesn’t look like it’s coming from a residential IP block. • Incoming Email: OpenSMTPD on my MXes, with MTA‐STS and DNSSEC/DANE so as many senders use TLS as possible. Delivers to Maildir on my LAN, which I access directly using mblaze over SSH (https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze) and IMAP v
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ia Dovecot (which supports Maildir backend). • Roundcube webmail. • DNS zones: NSD running on two VPSes, slaves pulling their config via WireGuard from the master which runs in a VM on my LAN. • Public webserver, with personal (public) homepage, Git repositories (clonable and browsable via CGit), photo gallery, files/images/random files when I need to share them by sending a link in IRC, etc. • Matrix: Synapse for the server, Element for the client. Besides hanging out in Matrix rooms I use this for one‐on‐one audio calls with my friends (generate a link, send it to them, and chat through the browser). • Pleroma, so I can interact with the Mastodon network. • Apertium for text translation. The range of languages is a bit limited but for supported pairs it’s nice to avoid Google Translate. • A home theater PC in my living room running Kodi, which pulls all my Blu‐Rays from a home NAS. • A powerful gaming machine that uses Steam to stream games to either the HTPC or my Steam Deck. I only use this at home… I wonder how bad the latency would be if I connected to it when on a trip? • My music collection, whether ripped from CD or bought digitally, is automatically tagged and sorted with Beets, and I run the web plugin to access it over the web. Beets’s web interface is kind of primitive; I would love to replace it with something like FunkWhale. • Full mirrors of websites with free content: Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wiktionary, Stack Overflow, Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks • Full OpenBSD package mirrors • OpenStreetMap, running OSRM (routing) on top of an open source Leaflet/Mapbox demo I set up years ago. I’ve been meaning to update this to something more modern and less reliant on Mapbox software. • Radicale for CalDAV/CardDAV, so my calendar and contacts are synced across all my devices automatically. • Home adblocking with Unbound (what most people use PiHole for I guess). DNS lookups for my home network are anonymized with DoH over Tor (CloudFlare provides documentation for how to do this). • Ways to access my home network when away from home: WireGuard VPN in a roadwarrior configuration; public‐facing SSH (with WebAuthn‐backed keys); failing that, an HTTPS proxy with Squid. (Yes, I have been stuck at conferences where the wifi network blocked SSH, WireGuard, and all traffic that wasn’t HTTP/HTTPS or DNS from the blessed server!)
In Ask HN: What services/apps are you self-hosting?

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