[notmuch] How to index /var/spool/mail with notmuch

[Carl Worth]

On Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:24:47 +0100, Tassilo Horn <tassilo at member.fsf.org> wrote:
> But I get some permission problems when trying to index /var/spool/mail.
> I was able to create a .notmuch/ directory in there with permissions set
> to 700 for my user.  All mail files are readable for my user.
> 
> Unfortunately, there are some dovecot internal files, which should
> neither be indexed by notmuch, and which have 600 permissions for the
> mail user.  And that's where notmuch errors and stops indexing. :-(

Hi Tassilo, welcome to notmuch!

I'm glad you found a workaround for this problem, (thanks Jed!).

But perhaps these errors should be made into warnings instead? Any
thoughts on that anyone?

> All "real" mail files are named "u.<number>", so it would be cool if I
> could provide a pattern to notmuch matching all files I'd like to index.
> And maybe the other way round (a blacklist pattern) would be useful,
> too.

I've been planning on having a blacklist pattern for a
while. Originally, the only difficulty in implementing it was that we
had nowhere to store configuration information. But we have a
configuration file now, so this would be a pretty easy thing to
implement.

It's not as obvious that a whitelist pattern would be as widely useful,
but it would be possible too.

-Carl