mbox: retrieving threads

Note

If you are looking for a way to continuously retrieve full threads (or even full search results) from a public-inbox server, the lei tool provides a much more robust way of doing that.

Retrieving full discussion threads is the most basic use of b4. All you need to know is the message-id of any message in the thread:

b4 mbox 20200313231252.64999-1-keescook@chromium.org

Alternatively, if you have found a thread on lore.kernel.org and you want to retrieve it in full, you can just use the full URL:

b4 mbox https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200313231252.64999-1-keescook@chromium.org/#t

By default, b4 will save the thread in a mailbox format using the message-id of the message as the filename base:

$ b4 mbox 20200313231252.64999-1-keescook@chromium.org
Grabbing thread from lore.kernel.org/all/20200313231252.64999-1-keescook%40chromium.org/t.mbox.gz
5 messages in the thread
Saved ./20200313231252.64999-1-keescook@chromium.org.mbx

Option flags

-m LOCALMBOX, --use-local-mbox LOCALMBOX

By default, b4 will retrieve threads from remote public-inbox servers, but it can also use a local mailbox/maildir. This is useful if you have a tool like mbsync or lei copying remote messages locally and you need to do some work while offline. You can pass - to read messages from stdin.

--stdin-pipe-sep STDIN_PIPE_SEP (0.11+)

When reading input from stdin, split messages using the string passed as parameter. Otherwise, b4 expects stdin to be a single message or a valid mbox.

This is most useful when piping threads directly from mutt. In your .muttrc add the following configuration parameter:

set pipe_sep = "\n---randomstr---\n"

Then invoke b4 with -m - --stdin-pipe-sep='\n---randomstr---\n'

-C, --no-cache

By default, b4 will cache the retrieved threads for about 10 minutes. This lets you force b4 to ignore cache and retrieve the latest results.

-o OUTDIR, --outdir OUTDIR

Instead of writing the .mbox file to the current directory, write it to this location instead. You can also pass a path to an existing mbox or maildir location to have the results appended to that mailbox instead (see also the -f flag below).

-c, --check-newer-revisions

When retrieving patch series, check if a newer revision is available. For example, if you are trying to retrieve a series titled [PATCH v2 0/3], b4 will use a number of mechanisms to check if a v3 or later revision is also available and will add these results to the retrieved thread.

-n WANTNAME, --mbox-name WANTNAME

By default, the resulting mailbox file will use the message-id as the basis for its filename. This option lets you override this behaviour.

-M, --save-as-maildir

By default, the retrieved thread will be saved as an mbox file. However, due to subtle incompatibilities between various mbox formats (“mboxo” vs “mboxrd”, etc), you may want to instead save the results as a Maildir directory.

-f, --filter-dupes

When adding messages to existing mailbox or maildir (with -o), this will check all existing messages and will only add those messages that aren’t already present. Note, that this uses simple message-id matching and no other checks for correctness are performed.

Using with mutt

If you are a mutt or neomutt user and your mail is stored locally, you can define a quick macro that would let you quickly retrieve full threads and add them to your inbox. This is handy if you are cc’d in the middle of a conversation and you want to retrieve the rest of the thread for context.

Add something like the following to your ~/.muttrc:

macro index 4 "<pipe-message>b4 mbox -fo ~/Mail<return>"

Now selecting a message in the message index and pressing “4” will retrieve the rest of the thread from the public-inbox server and add them to the local maildir (~/Mail in the example above).