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

[Tassilo Horn]

Carl Worth <cworth at cworth.org> writes:

Hi Carl,

>> 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!).

Trying out notmuch already cashed out. ;-)

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

I think so.  For other dovecot internal index files it already says
something like "Ignoring non-mail file foobar.idx" and simply skips that
file.  I think that's the right thing to do for files where it has no
read permissions for, too.

>> 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.

Well, for dovecot users using the dbox format, a whitelist pattern would
be much simpler because of the coherent mail file naming.  But I could
live with a blacklist pattern, too.

Bye,
Tassilo