Approaches to initial tagging of messages
This page collects scripts and strategies for organizing mail using notmuch and doing automated initial tagging.
Here's a very general and ad-hoc approach to initial message tagging.
The [new] config section allows you to control which tags new messages
receive. This sets all new messages to get the new tag:
[new]
tags=new;
After running notmuch new, all new messages will be marked new.
You can then do various tag post-processing by just acting on messages
with that tag. For instance, a post-processing script might do the
following:
# immediately archive all messages from "me"
notmuch tag -new -- tag:new and from:me@example.com
# delete all messages from a spammer:
notmuch tag +deleted -- tag:new and from:spam@spam.com
# tag all message from notmuch mailing list
notmuch tag +notmuch -- tag:new and to:notmuch@notmuchmail.org
# finally, retag all "new" messages "inbox" and "unread"
notmuch tag +inbox +unread -new -- tag:new
Since the post-processing is only acting on a few messages, it is generally extremely fast.
You can use the post-new hook, which is automatically run after notmuch new,
to do post-processing. See man notmuch-hooks for details on hooks.
Other solutions
Carl Worth's approach to tagging. It is email id:87r5o8stbj.fsf@yoom.home.cworth.org in the notmuch mailing list archives.
One user's setup (id:87hbp5j9dv.fsf@hackervisions.org), which includes using the inbox tag as a "new mail" flag.
Another user's setup (id:"87tyfu3k5a.fsf@gmail.com"), which uses a dedicated tag for marking new mail, which is then sorted with a python script using Bogofilter for spam detection. This is generally a great deal faster than a shell-scripted approach. This approach introduces a workflow built around a "watch" tag. Here, the user is only presented with threads as they are started. At this point the user can choose to watch the thread, in which case future messages will be tagged with "inbox", or ignore it. This provides an excellent means for dealing with a large flux of messages with a low signal-to-noise.
afew is an initial tagging solution that should work out of the box for most basic tagging needs (mailinglist handling, killed thread handling, autoarchiving of sent mails) and has some fancy features (e.g. mail classification using bayesian filters).
Notmuch Delivery Agent -- notmuch-deliver
The Notmuch Delivery Agent (announcement) is a tool for delivering emails to maildir, add them to the Notmuch database, and tag them as desired.