Selecting Multiple Messages
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There are several message operations that can operate on multiple
messages, including Forward and Delete, which are described
in the Sections Forwarding Messages and
Deleting Messages.
exmh supports two different ways to select multiple messages.
You can use the mouse to select multiple messages,
or you can select messages based on their content.
To select multiple messages with the mouse,
position the cursor at one end of a range in
the table of contents, press and hold the first mouse button,
and drag the cursor to the other end of the range.
This selects a contiguous range of messages.
You can add more messages to an existing selection by holding down the
Shift key as you drag the mouse.
You can add an individual message by holding down the Shift key
as you click on the message.
exmh lets you create a noncontiguous selection this way.
If you Shift-click on a message that is already selected,
then it becomes unselected.
If you need to select a lot of messages, simply drag the mouse off
the top or bottom of the window.
The display scrolls automatically and the selection is extended.
The MH pick program
can find messages based on their content,
which is a powerful way to look through lots of mail.
pick understands message header fields and date formats,
and it lets you build up complex Boolean search expressions.
exmh provides an interface to pick, and it
selects the messages in the table of contents based on the results
of the pick command.
Click the Pick button in the group of folder operation buttons.
The dialog shown in The Figure below appears.
Position this window where you want by using your window manager;
exmh will remember its location for you.
Figure: The Pick dialog
The dialog contains entries for the Subject:,
From:, To:, and Cc: header fields.
If you leave any of these blank, the field is ignored.
In the example figure, the subject is filled in with "windowing,"
so pick will search for all messages with the word
"windowing" in their Subject: field.
The Before and After fields are date fields.
You can find all messages before or after a given date by
using these fields.
Specify dates using the mm/dd/yy (month/date/year) format.
Be sure to include the year.
Dates can also be keywords like "today", "yesterday", "tomorrow",
or any day of the week ("Sunday", "Monday", and so on).
The Search field is used to search over the body of your messages.
This search method runs more slowly because pick must read through
all of your messages, not just their headers.
If you fill in more than one field, pick finds messages
that match all the criteria.
In other words, it does the logical
and of the search criteria.
If you want to search for this or
that, then click the Or button in the dialog.
This adds another set of fields to the dialog, and pick will search
for everthing that matches the first set or matches the
second set.
The messages found by pick are selected in the
table of contents.
By default, the previous selection is cleared.
If you choose the Add to sel checkbutton first,
then the existing selection is preserved
and the messages found by pick are added to the selection.
Once you have selected a set of messages, either by pick or
with the mouse, you can shrink the table of contents so it
only contains the selected messages.
Click the New FTOC button in the Pick interface to do this.
The advantage of doing this is that Next and Prev move
you through this limited table of contents so you can easily browse the
selected messages.
The drawback of New FTOC is that a subsequent pick only
finds messages in the reduced table of contents, not the whole folder.
You have to select Rescan folder from the folder
More... menu to restore the complete table of contents.
Because pick can be slow, exmh also implements
fast searching over the current folder listing and current message body.
If you click the Find button in the folder buttons, a small search
dialog appears.
Click the FTOC radio button to search over the
table of contents, or click the Msg radio button to search over the
message body.
The search is case insensitive,
which means that lowercase letters in the search pattern
match uppercase letters, too.
Uppercase letters in the pattern
only match uppercase.
The fast search over the table of contents
is quite limited in comparison to pick.
It finds only things that are displayed in the window,
and it selects only one message at a time.
However, it is generally faster than pick.
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