How to...

Some tips about how to do some useful things with notmuch, and the various "third party" notmuch utilities.

• Receive mail

  Notmuch requires either maildir flag or a "mh"-style maildirectory to operate on. Basically any setup in which each mail is in a file of its own will work. Here are some generally well-regarded mail retrieval tools:

  • offlineimap - quite useful and widely tested, it also offers a handy hook that will come in useful a bit later in our setup. Also supports "presynchook" and "postsynchook" command that will get run whenever you sync. Point postsynchook to a script that gets run on every sync and that will do the automatic updating and tagging of your notmuch database.

  • mbsync

  • getmail

  • fetchmail

  See the initial tagging page for more info on initial tagging of messages.

• Use notmuch from python

  Notmuch includes python bindings to the notmuch shared library. Extensive API documentation is available.

  The bindings are very simple to use. As an example, given you have the python bindings installed (or simply set your PYTHONPATH environment variable to point to the .../bindings/python directory), this snippet will produce a list of mails matching the given expression:

    >>> import notmuch
    >>> db = notmuch.Database()
    >>> query = db.create_query('tag:inbox AND NOT tag:killed')
    >>> list(query.search_messages()) # doctest:+ELLIPSIS
    [...]
  

• Sync notmuch tags and maildir flags

  notmuch since version 0.5 syncs maildir flags and respective tags in both directions. This part applies only to notmuch prior to version 0.5:

  Some IMAP users rely on maildir flags that convey the status "seen", "replied", "trashed", in order to synchronize the status of their mail across mail clients (a maildir flag is simply a defined part of their filename). Notmuch will by default happily ignore those flags and will never modify them either, as there is no built-in support for synchronizing your notmuch tags with your imap maildir flags (seen, replied, trashed, etc). However there are currently 2 ways in which you can achieve synchronization.

  notmuchsync is a utility (based on the cnotmuch python bindings) that allows synchronization in either direction, as well as pruning of deleted files.

  The second solution allows for fast maildir flag to notmuch tag synchronization (and only in that direction) requires patching the notmuch source code. The patch has been posted in this mail id:1267450136-31749-1-git-send-email-Sebastian@SSpaeth.de and can be viewed as a source diff in this git repository.

• Using notmuch with Mutt

  Notmuch is a great mail indexing tool that can also be used in conjunction with existing Mail User Agents (MUA) instead of replacing them. The advantage of such mixed solutions is that users can benefit from notmuch features (such as full-text search and thread reconstruction) without having to change MUA.

  A popular geek MUA is the Mutt e-mail client; integrating notmuch with Mutt is fairly straightforward. An how to use Notmuch with Mutt has been written by Stefano Zacchiroli, together with some glue code. Check out the howto for more information.

  (Note by the howto author: I've linked the howto from this wiki rather than splicing it in, in order to avoid duplication of information. If you think it would be better to have it here, feel free to copy the text here. The howto is available in markdown syntax from the Git repository of my homepage.)

• Automatically retagging the database (e.g., when upgrading versions)

  Certain versions of notmuch include new automatic tags (for example, between 0.3 and 0.10, automatic tagging of signed and encrypted messages was added). However, for users running with databases created in older versions of notmuch, these tags are missing in pre-existing messages and need to be added. One way to do this is as follows:

                     $ notmuch dump ~/out.nm
                     $ mv ~/Mail/.notmuch ~/.notmuch.bak
                     $ notmuch new
                     $ notmuch tag -inbox -unread '*'
                     $ notmuch restore --accumulate ~/out.nm
  

  At this point, one should run a sanity check on the tags, and if everything has merged correctly, the ~/.notmuch.bak directory is expendable, as is ~/out.nm.

• Dealing with mbox and other formats

  notmuch by itself is unable to handle non-maildir mail archives. One tool to solve this is called mb2md. Assuming an mbox in ~/test.mbox and ones mail archives to be in ~/Mail, an invocation would look like

                     $ mb2md -s ~/test.mbox -d ~/Mail/mynewmaildirname
  

  Note that specifying the paths for -s and -d is necessary. This will create a new maildir in ~/Mail/mynewmaildirname from the mbox at ~/test.mbox.

  Often the formats are more convoluted, however. Many lists provide an almost-but-not-quite-mbox format that mailman produces, as can be seen, for example, here. These files can be converted with some degree of success to mbox using the script found here, and from mbox to maildir as above.

  However, many of these lists also have a gmane version, which, where it exists, achieves far better results than dealing with the messy mailman output. Using the instructions from Gmane's site, we can download an mbox file, which we can then convert to maildir using mb2md or other utility.

• Take advantage of tags that are special to notmuch

  See tags special to notmuch.