NOTMUCH-SHOW(1)

NAME

       notmuch-show - show messages matching the given search terms

SYNOPSIS

       notmuch show [option ...] <search-term> ...

DESCRIPTION

Shows all messages matching the search terms.

See notmuch-search-terms(7) for details of the supported syntax for
<search-terms>.

The messages will be grouped and sorted based on the threading (all
replies to a particular message will appear immediately after that mes‐
sage in date order). The output is not indented by default, but depth
tags are printed so that proper indentation can be performed by a
post-processor (such as the emacs interface to notmuch).

Supported options for show include

--entire-thread=(true|false)
If true, notmuch show outputs all messages in the thread of any
message matching the search terms; if false, it outputs only the
matching messages. For --format=json and --format=sexp this de‐
faults to true. For other formats, this defaults to false.

--format=(text|json|sexp|mbox|raw)

text (default for messages)
The default plain-text format has all text-content MIME
parts decoded. Various components in the output, (mes-
sage, header, body, attachment, and MIME part), will be
delimited by easily-parsed markers. Each marker consists
of a Control-L character (ASCII decimal 12), the name of
the marker, and then either an opening or closing brace,
('{' or '}'), to either open or close the component. For
a multipart MIME message, these parts will be nested.

json The output is formatted with Javascript Object Notation
(JSON). This format is more robust than the text format
for automated processing. The nested structure of multi‐
part MIME messages is reflected in nested JSON output. By
default JSON output includes all messages in a matching
thread; that is, by default, --format=json sets --en-
tire-thread. The caller can disable this behaviour by
setting --entire-thread=false. The JSON output is always
encoded as UTF-8 and any message content included in the
output will be charset-converted to UTF-8.

sexp The output is formatted as the Lisp s-expression (sexp)
equivalent of the JSON format above. Objects are format‐
ted as property lists whose keys are keywords (symbols
preceded by a colon). True is formatted as t and both
false and null are formatted as nil. As for JSON, the
s-expression output is always encoded as UTF-8.

mbox All matching messages are output in the traditional, Unix
mbox format with each message being prefixed by a line
beginning with "From " and a blank line separating each
message. Lines in the message content beginning with
"From " (preceded by zero or more '>' characters) have an
additional '>' character added. This reversible escaping
is termed "mboxrd" format and described in detail here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/mail-mbox-formats.html

raw (default if --part is given)
Write the raw bytes of the given MIME part of a message
to standard out. For this format, it is an error to spec‐
ify a query that matches more than one message.

If the specified part is a leaf part, this outputs the
body of the part after performing content transfer decod‐
ing (but no charset conversion). This is suitable for
saving attachments, for example.

For a multipart or message part, the output includes the
part headers as well as the body (including all child
parts). No decoding is performed because multipart and
message parts cannot have non-trivial content transfer
encoding. Consumers of this may need to implement MIME
decoding and similar functions.

--format-version=N
Use the specified structured output format version. This is in‐
tended for programs that invoke notmuch(1) internally. If omit‐
ted, the latest supported version will be used.

--part=N
Output the single decoded MIME part N of a single message. The
search terms must match only a single message. Message parts are
numbered in a depth-first walk of the message MIME structure,
and are identified in the 'json', 'sexp' or 'text' output for‐
mats.

Note that even a message with no MIME structure or a single body
part still has two MIME parts: part 0 is the whole message
(headers and body) and part 1 is just the body.

--sort=(newest-first|oldest-first)
This option can be used to present results in either chronologi‐
cal order (oldest-first) or reverse chronological order (new-
est-first).

Only threads as a whole are reordered. Ordering of messages
within each thread will not be affected by this flag, since that
order is always determined by the thread's replies.

By default, results will be displayed in reverse chronological
order, (that is, the newest results will be displayed first).

--verify
Compute and report the validity of any MIME cryptographic signa‐
tures found in the selected content (e.g., "multipart/signed"
parts). Status of the signature will be reported (currently only
supported with --format=json and --format=sexp), and the multi‐
part/signed part will be replaced by the signed data.

--decrypt=(false|auto|true|stash)
If true, decrypt any MIME encrypted parts found in the selected
content (e.g., "multipart/encrypted" parts). Status of the de‐
cryption will be reported (currently only supported with --for-
mat=json and --format=sexp) and on successful decryption the
multipart/encrypted part will be replaced by the decrypted con‐
tent.

stash behaves like true, but upon successful decryption it will
also stash the message's session key in the database, and index
the cleartext of the message, enabling automatic decryption in
the future.

If auto, and a session key is already known for the message,
then it will be decrypted, but notmuch will not try to access
the user's keys.

Use false to avoid even automatic decryption.

Non-automatic decryption (stash or true, in the absence of a
stashed session key) expects a functioning gpg-agent(1) to pro‐
vide any needed credentials. Without one, the decryption will
fail.

Note: setting either true or stash here implies --verify.

Here is a table that summarizes each of these policies:

┌──────────────┬───────┬──────┬──────┬───────┐
│ │ false │ auto │ true │ stash │
├──────────────┼───────┼──────┼──────┼───────┤
│Show cleart‐ │ │ X │ X │ X │
│ext if ses‐ │ │ │ │ │
│sion key is │ │ │ │ │
│already known │ │ │ │ │
├──────────────┼───────┼──────┼──────┼───────┤
│Use secret │ │ │ X │ X │
│keys to show │ │ │ │ │
│cleartext │ │ │ │ │
├──────────────┼───────┼──────┼──────┼───────┤
│Stash any │ │ │ │ X │
│newly recov‐ │ │ │ │ │
│ered session │ │ │ │ │
│keys, rein‐ │ │ │ │ │
│dexing mes‐ │ │ │ │ │
│sage if found │ │ │ │ │
└──────────────┴───────┴──────┴──────┴───────┘

Note: --decrypt=stash requires write access to the database.
Otherwise, notmuch show operates entirely in read-only mode.

Default: auto

--exclude=(true|false)
Specify whether to omit threads only matching search.ex‐
clude_tags from the search results (the default) or not. In ei‐
ther case the excluded message will be marked with the exclude
flag (except when output=mbox when there is nowhere to put the
flag).

If --entire-thread is specified then complete threads are re‐
turned regardless (with the excluded flag being set when appro‐
priate) but threads that only match in an excluded message are
not returned when --exclude=true.

The default is --exclude=true.

--body=(true|false)
If true (the default) notmuch show includes the bodies of the
messages in the output; if false, bodies are omitted.
--body=false is only implemented for the text, json and sexp
formats and it is incompatible with --part > 0.

This is useful if the caller only needs the headers as body-less
output is much faster and substantially smaller.

--include-html
Include "text/html" parts as part of the output (currently only
supported with --format=text, --format=json and --format=sexp).
By default, unless --part=N is used to select a specific part or
--include-html is used to include all "text/html" parts, no part
with content type "text/html" is included in the output.

A common use of notmuch show is to display a single thread of email
messages. For this, use a search term of "thread:<thread-id>" as can be
seen in the first column of output from the notmuch-search(1) command.

CONFIGURATION

       Structured  output (json / sexp) is influenced by the configuration op‐
       tion show.extra_headers. See notmuch-config(1) for details.

EXIT STATUS

       This command supports the following special exit status codes

       20     The requested format version is too old.

       21     The requested format version is too new.

AUTHOR

       Carl Worth and many others

COPYRIGHT

       2009-2022, Carl Worth and many others