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Notmuch -- Just an email system

If you've been looking for a fast, global-search and tag-based email system to use within your text editor or in a terminal...

If you're the kind of person that gets excited about being able to write shell scripts for exploring and manipulating your email...

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...

If you want the convenience of fast, reliable search of all your email, but don't want to give a 3rd-party access to your email...

Then notmuch may be exactly what you've been looking for.

  1. Notmuch -- Just an email system
    1. Why is it named Notmuch?
    2. News
    3. Getting Started
    4. Email Clients and Front Ends
    5. Documentation
    6. Screenshots
    7. Obtaining Notmuch
    8. Contact: Email & IRC
    9. Troubleshooting, Reporting Bugs and Feature Requests
    10. Development and Contributing
    11. Website

Why is it named Notmuch?

News

Notmuch news (mostly release notes and changes).

Getting Started

To get started with Notmuch, just run "notmuch" at the command line. This command will walk you through initial setup, including specifying the location of your mail store and how to start the initial indexing.

For a little more detailed guide, see Getting Started with Notmuch.

Email Clients and Front Ends

Notmuch ships with a powerful set of command-line tools, an email client for Emacs, another client for vim, and a Mutt integration script.

There are also many other email clients, frontends and tools based on Notmuch.

Documentation

Apart from the wiki, help is available via email and on IRC (see below). Join the mailing list. Read the archives. Ask questions.

Screenshots

Obtaining Notmuch

Notmuch source releases are available as source tar balls.

Notmuch is packaged for at least the following operating systems and distributions:

Contact: Email & IRC

Comments? Please feel free to email the notmuch mailing list: notmuch@notmuchmail.org (subscription is not required, but you can also subscribe to the notmuch mailing list). You can also browse the online list archives or download an archive of the entire mailing-list.

The archive unpacks to maildir format which is convenient for reading the archives within notmuch itself.

If you prefer real-time chat, there is often someone on the #notmuch@irc.libera.chat IRC channel. Don't ask if you can ask a question, just ask, and please wait for an answer, we might not be in your timezone.

Troubleshooting, Reporting Bugs and Feature Requests

Please send bug reports and feature requests to the Notmuch mailing list notmuch@notmuchmail.org.

For hints about troubleshooting and bug reporting see bugs.

Please see the nmbug status page for lists of known bugs and feature requests.

Development and Contributing

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 https://git.notmuchmail.org/git/notmuch

You can browse the Notmuch code history online. The Notmuch OpenHub project page has a nice summary of the codebase and activity.

Continuous integration build and test suite status: Build Status

Contributions, such as patches, to Notmuch are most welcome. Please refer to the guide to contributing.

Website

This website is a wiki, maintained using ikiwiki. Here are instructions on how to edit the wiki. The wiki contents are mostly dual licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0 and GPLv3+.