Why Notmuch?

• "Not much mail" is what Notmuch thinks about your email collection. Even if you receive 12000 messages per month or have on the order of millions of messages that you've been saving for decades. Regardless, Notmuch will be able to quickly search all of it. It's just plain not much mail.

• "Not much mail" is also what you should have in your inbox at any time. Notmuch gives you what you need, (tags and fast search), so that you can keep your inbox tamed and focus on what really matters in your life, (which is surely not email).

• Notmuch is an answer to Sup. Sup is a very good email program written by William Morgan (and others) and is the direct inspiration for Notmuch. Notmuch began as an effort to rewrite performance-critical pieces of Sup in C rather than ruby. From there, it grew into a separate project. One significant contribution Notmuch makes compared to Sup is the separation of the indexer/searcher from the user interface. (Notmuch provides a library interface so that its indexing/searching/tagging features can be integrated into any email program.)

• Notmuch is not much of an email program. It doesn't receive messages (no POP or IMAP suport). It doesn't send messages (no mail composer, no network code at all). And for what it does do (email search) that work is provided by an external library, Xapian. So if Notmuch provides no user interface and Xapian does all the heavy lifting, then what's left here? Not much.

Notmuch is still in the early stages of development, but there are already three user interfaces available for it (one for emacs, one for vim, and another using curses for running within a terminal). If you've been looking for a fast, global-search and tag-based email reader to use within your text editor or in a terminal, then Notmuch may be exactly what you've been looking for.

Otherwise, if you're a developer of an existing email program and would love a good library interface for fast, global search with support for arbitrary tags, then Notmuch also may be exactly what you've been looking for.

Either way, please feel free to jump in. All of the code for Notmuch is available as free software released under the GNU GPL version 3. The latest versions can be checked out via git with this command:

git clone git://notmuchmail.org/git/notmuch

Or you can browse the Notmuch code history online.

Patches are most welcome and should be sent to notmuch@notmuchmail.org. Please try to follow the patch submission guidelines of the Git project when submitting patches to notmuch. We are currently test-driving a Patchwork instance to help us keep track of the patches.

Comments? Please feel free to email the notmuch mailing list: notmuch@notmuchmail.org (subscription is not required, but you can subscribe to the notmuch list if you would like to). You can also browse the online archives or the mailing list or download an mbox file of the entire mailing-list. The mb2md utility can then be used to convert the archives to maildir format which is convenient for reading the archives within notmuch itself.

This wiki is maintained using ikiwiki. You can pull and push changes using the following URL (no authentication necessary):

git://notmuchmail.org/git/notmuch-wiki