NOTMUCH-DUMP(1)

NAME

       notmuch-dump - creates a plain-text dump of the tags of each message

SYNOPSIS

       notmuch dump [--gzip] [--format=(batch-tag|sup)] [--output=<file>] [--]
       [<search-term> ...]

DESCRIPTION

Dump tags for messages matching the given search terms.

Output is to the given filename, if any, or to stdout.

These tags are the only data in the notmuch database that can't be
recreated from the messages themselves. The output of notmuch dump is
therefore the only critical thing to backup (and much more friendly to
incremental backup than the native database files.)

See notmuch-search-terms(7) for details of the supported syntax for
<search-terms>. With no search terms, a dump of all messages in the
database will be generated. A -- argument instructs notmuch that the
remaining arguments are search terms.

Supported options for dump include

--gzip Compress the output in a format compatible with gzip(1).

--format=(sup|batch-tag)
Notmuch restore supports two plain text dump formats, both with
one message-id per line, followed by a list of tags.

batch-tag
The default batch-tag dump format is intended to more ro‐
bust against malformed message-ids and tags containing
whitespace or non-ascii(7) characters. Each line has the
form:

+<*encoded-tag*\ > +<*encoded-tag*\ > ... -- id:<*quoted-message-id*\ >

Tags are hex-encoded by replacing every byte not matching
the regex [A-Za-z0-9@=.,_+-] with %nn where nn is the two
digit hex encoding. The message ID is a valid Xapian
query, quoted using Xapian boolean term quoting rules: if
the ID contains whitespace or a close paren or starts
with a double quote, it must be enclosed in double quotes
and double quotes inside the ID must be doubled. The as‐
tute reader will notice this is a special case of the
batch input format for notmuch-tag(1); note that the sin‐
gle message-id query is mandatory for notmuch-restore(1).

sup The sup dump file format is specifically chosen to be
compatible with the format of files produced by
sup-dump(1). So if you've previously been using sup for
mail, then the notmuch-restore(1) command provides you a
way to import all of your tags (or labels as sup calls
them). Each line has the following form:

<*message-id*\ > **(** <*tag*\ > ... **)**

with zero or more tags are separated by spaces. Note that
(malformed) message-ids may contain arbitrary non-null
characters. Note also that tags with spaces will not be
correctly restored with this format.

--include=(config|properties|tags)
Control what kind of metadata is included in the output.

config Output configuration data stored in the database. Each
line starts with "#@ ", followed by a space separated
key-value pair. Both key and value are hex encoded if
needed.

properties
Output per-message (key,value) metadata. Each line
starts with "#= ", followed by a message id, and a space
separated list of key=value pairs. Ids, keys and values
are hex encoded if needed. See notmuch-properties(7) for
more details.

tags Output per-message boolean metadata, namely tags. See
format above for description of the output.

The default is to include all available types of data. The op‐
tion can be specified multiple times to select some subset. As
of version 3 of the dump format, there is a header line of the
following form:

#notmuch-dump <*format*>:<*version*> <*included*>

where <included> is a comma separated list of the above options.

--output=<filename>
Write output to given file instead of stdout.

AUTHOR

       Carl Worth and many others

COPYRIGHT

       2009-2022, Carl Worth and many others