Rules for dealing with email in mu4e

Question

The Mail application in macOS allows creation of rules, such as Sender X and keyword Y in subject -> mark as read and move to archive. I am looking for something similar in mu4e.

Smart refiling has a similar feature:

you can select some messages in the headers view, then press r, and have them all marked for refiling to their particular folders.

What I'm looking for is that result without having to see the message or press r to refile it.

Does it exist?

Answer 1

I don't think so. In any case, the function that does the refiling is called mu4e~proc-move, so all you need is the message's docid and target folder. But how do you know which messages are new during the indexing process? One way around this is to find messages flagged unread using the mu find command (see below).

(defvar mu4e-find-new-messages-command
  "mu find maildir:/YOUR_INBOX_FOLDER flag:unread --format=sexp 2>/dev/null")

(defun mu4e-refile-messages ()
  (let* ((cmd mu4e-find-new-messages-command)
         (res (concat "(list" (shell-command-to-string cmd) ")"))
         (msgs (car (read-from-string res))))
    (unless (equal '(list) msgs)
      (dolist (msg msgs)
        (when-let ((docid (mu4e-message-field msg :docid))
                   (maildir (funcall mu4e-refile-folder msg)))
          (mu4e~proc-move docid maildir))))))

(add-to-list 'mu4e-index-updated-hook 'mu4e-refile-messages)