Limiting Messages Shown

Limiting is another way that knowing how to use patterns make you faster. More often than not, you've got too much mail in your box to deal with. Limiting how much of it you see is convenient and helpful, and only a keystroke away. The 'l' command (lower case L) limits the messages shown in the index. It doesn't delete anything, it just limits which messages are presented in the index according to your criteria, which you can specify using regular expressions or certain keys.

For example, hit 'l' and then type the word `proje' and hit return. Of all the messages in the index, only those that have the expression `proje' somewhere in the subject or address fields will be shown. To remove the limitation, hit `l.' (that's L followed by a period), which requests mutt to show messages that contain any character at all, that is, all messages. See section 6 for a complete list of patterns. Using patterns, you can limit the index view to a subset of your messages. Unless you indicate something specific using those criteria, mutt will assume you are searching on the subject and sender fields of all your mail. For example, to limit by date, l ~d>2w to limit the index to all messages whose received date (~d) is greater than two weeks (>2w), or set l ~N to see only messages that have been flagged `new.'

If you forget what your criteria for limiting was, or would just like to confirm whether or not you are limiting them, Esc-L is the key combination that will reveal in the status bar what the current limiter is.

The ~d sequence limits messages based on date criteria. This is highly useful. An example is worth a thousand words, so let the following serve as guides:

Figure 7: Criteria for Working with Dates