Notmuch -- The mail indexer

Why Notmuch?

Because dealing with your mail can be so much better.

"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 support). 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.

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.

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.

News

The latest news from notmuch

Documentation

To get started with notmuch, just run "notmuch" at the command line. The configuration wizard will walk you through initial setup, including specifying the location of your mail store and how to start the initial indexing. After that, come back and checkout our docs:

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

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 and frontends based on Notmuch. And a few tips about integrating it with Mutt and Vim.

Screenshots

Emacs UI screenshots

Obtaining Notmuch

Notmuch source releases are available as source tar balls.

Notmuch is packaged for the following distributions:

Debian (Please use at least the packages from squeeze-backports, squeeze packages are very outdated!)
Fedora
Gentoo
Slackware
Ubuntu

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 git://notmuchmail.org/git/notmuch

You can browse the Notmuch code history online. And finally, you can subscribe to the notmuch-commits list to watch every commit made to notmuch and the notmuchmail.org web site.

We have a buildbot (here's its configuration).

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

Bug and patch tracking

The tagging and filtering features of notmuch make it quite suitable for use as a bug- and patch-tracker. We are currently experimenting with using it for this purpose for notmuch development, using a utility called nmbug. The status of bugs and current patches can also be followed online.

Bug reports should be sent to the Notmuch mailing list notmuch@notmuchmail.org.

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, read them as a web forum (nabble), or download an mbox file of the entire mailing-list.

The mb2md utility can be used to convert the archives 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.freenode.net IRC channel.

Feature ideas

If you have a feature idea/request, please send it to the mailing list. You don't have to be subscribed to send, although there might be a delay for non-subscribers.

Website

This wiki is maintained using ikiwiki. Here are instructions on how to edit the wiki.