Search based on "reply-to"

[Daniel Fleischer]

Hi, I was wondering how can I search for the "reply-to" field?

[Dirk-Jan C. Binnema]

On Sunday Nov 23 2025, Daniel Fleischer wrote:

> Hi, I was wondering how can I search for the "reply-to" field?

It's not possibly to search for arbitrary fields (including reply-to),
see
mu info fields
for the list of fields you can use.

Kind regards,
Dirk.

--
Dirk-Jan C. Binnema Helsinki, Finland
e:dj...@djcbsoftware.nl w:www.djcbsoftware.nl
gpg: 6987 9CED 1745 9375 0F14 DA98 11DD FEA9 DCC4 A036

[Daniel Fleischer]

Thanks. Say I would like to implement this specific field, which files would I need to touch?

[Daniel Fleischer]

I have a specific use case: an email was sent from an automated system, with an automated "from" and an automated "subject" and automated "body". The only hint as to the origin of it is in the "reply-to" email which is the person's email, containing their name.

If implemented, I would say it can be part of the "contact" combi-field.

[Dirk-Jan C. Binnema]

Hi Daniel,

On Monday Nov 24 2025, Daniel Fleischer wrote:

> I have a specific use case: an email was sent from an automated system,
> with an automated "from" and an automated "subject" and automated "body".
> The only hint as to the origin of it is in the "reply-to" email which is
> the person's email, containing their name.
>
> If implemented, I would say it can be part of the "contact" combi-field.
>
> On Tuesday, November 25, 2025 at 9:21:25 AM UTC+2 Daniel Fleischer wrote:
>
>> Thanks. Say I would like to implement this specific field, which files
>> would I need to touch?

Appreciate the enthusiasm :-), but this would quite a bit of work (query
parsing, indexing, message handling, testing, documentation); moreover,
I'm generally hesitant to adding more fields.

Perhaps there's some other way that helps for your use-case?

Now, ':reply-to' field is available in the message plist, making it a
bit easier; you can use the json2 output and use jq; let's assume you
want to find f...@example.com for all messages matching "capybara",
something like:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
$ mu find $(mu find "capybara" --format=json2 | jq '.[] | select(."reply-to"[0].email == "f...@example.com") | ."message-id" ' | sed 's/^/OR msgid:/' | tr '\n' ' ')
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Just a quick hack, but maybe a start.

[Daniel Fleischer]

Thanks. In your example I know something about the email (capybara); in my example I only know the person's name so I would have to convert all emails to json and search them. 

I think I'll use tags or your new labels.

[Dirk-Jan C. Binnema]

On Wednesday Nov 26 2025, Daniel Fleischer wrote:

> Thanks. In your example I know something about the email (capybara); in my
> example I only know the person's name so I would have to convert all emails
> to json and search them.
> I think I'll use tags or your new labels.

Maybe there is _some_ criterion to narrow things down a bit, a
date-range if nothing else.

And indeed, you could combine this with labels or tags.

Good luck!