lei - an overview of lei

Preliminary Bash completion for lei is provided in "contrib/completion/". Contributions adding support for other shells, as well as improvements to the existing Bash completion, are welcome.

IMAP and NNTP client performance is poor on high-latency connections. It will hopefully be fixed in 2022.

Feedback welcome via plain-text mail to <mailto:meta@public-inbox.org> The mail archives are hosted at <https://public-inbox.org/meta/> and <http://4uok3hntl7oi7b4uf4rtfwefqeexfzil2w6kgk2jn5z2f764irre7byd.onion/meta/>

Copyright all contributors <mailto:meta@public-inbox.org> License: AGPL-3.0+ <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.txt>

lei(1) is a local email interface for public-inbox and personal mail. This document provides some basic examples.

In addition to the above store, lei can make read-only queries to "externals": inboxes and external indices. An external can be registered by passing a URL or local path to lei-add-external(1). For existing local paths, the external needs to be indexed with public-inbox-index(1) (in the case of a regular inbox) or public-inbox-extindex(1) (in the case of an external index).

lei has writable local storage based on public-inbox-v2-format(5). Commands will automatically initialize the store behind the scenes if needed, but you can call lei-init(1) directly if you want to use a store location other than the default "$XDG_DATA_HOME/lei/store". The lei-import(1) command provides the primary interface for importing messages into the local storage. In addition, other commands, such as lei-q(1) and lei-blob(1), use the local store to memoize messages from remotes. EXAMPLES $ lei import mboxrd:t.mbox.gz Import the messages from a gzipped mboxrd into the local storage. $ lei blob 59ec517f9 Show message with the git blob OID of 59ec517f9. If a message with that OID isn't found, check if the current git repository has the blob, trying to reconstruct it from a message if needed. $ lei blob 59ec517f9 | lei tag -F eml +kw:flagged +L:next Set the "flagged" keyword and "next" label on the message with the blob OID of 59ec517f9.

lei - an overview of lei

Inline::C is required, lei runs as a background daemon to reduce startup costs and can provide real-time kqueue(2)/inotify(7) Maildir monitoring. IO::KQueue (p5-IO-KQueue on FreeBSD) and Linux::Inotify2 (liblinux-inotify2-perl and perl-Linux-Inotify2 in .deb and .rpm-based distros, respectively) are recommended. Socket::MsgHdr is optional (libsocket-msghdr-perl in Debian), and further improves startup performance. Its effect is most felt when using shell completion.

The lei-q(1) command searches the local store and externals. The search prefixes match those available via public-inbox-httpd(1). EXAMPLES $ lei q s:lei s:skeleton Search for messages whose subject includes "lei" and "skeleton". $ lei q -t s:lei s:skeleton Do the same, but also report unmatched messages that are in the same thread as a matched message. $ lei q -t -o /tmp/mdir --mua=mutt s:lei s:skeleton Write results to a Maildir at "mdir". Mutt will be invoked to open mfolder ("mutt -f %f") while results are being fetched and written. $ lei q kw:flagged L:next Search for all flagged messages that also have a "next" label. $ lei p2q HEAD | lei q -tt -o /tmp/mdir Search for messages that have post-image git blob IDs that match those of the current repository's HEAD commit, writing them to the Maildir directory "mdir" and flagging the messages that were an exact match. $ git show -s HEAD | lei lcat Display a local message for the public-inbox link contained in a commit message. $ lei q -f text m:MESSAGE-ID | lei rediff -U5 Feed a message containing a diff to lei-rediff(1) to regenerate its diff with five context lines. Unless "--git-dir" is specified, this requires the current working directory to be within the associated code repository.

lei-mail-sync-overview(7) public-inbox.git 1993-10-02 LEI-OVERVIEW(7)

lei currently has primitive mail synchronization abilities; see lei-mail-sync-overview(7) for more details. EXAMPLES $ lei add-external https://public-inbox.org/meta/ Add a remote external for public-inbox's inbox. $ lei add-external --mirror https://public-inbox.org/meta/ path Clone <https://public-inbox.org/meta/> to "path", index it with public-inbox-index(1), and add it as a local external.

Since lei runs as a daemon, lei-daemon-kill(1) is required to kill the daemon so it can load new code. It will be restarted with the next invocation of any lei command.