[notmuch] Quick thoughts on a notmuch daemon

[Carl Worth]

On Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:51:58 -0500, micah anderson <micah at riseup.net> wrote:
> I've switched mail clients enough over the past few years to know that
> switching itself is a major pain.

Absolutely.

One concept in notmuch (compared to sup) is to (eventually) avoid people
having to go through that pain by their current mail client becoming
"notmuch enabled". For me, I had always liked composing email in emacs,
so I just have to add notmuch support to the existing emacs
message-mode.

Hopefully people working on other email interfaces will do similar
things, (would be great to have Anjal and Thunderbird get some notmuch
support for example).

I definitely didn't like that with sup, to get all the global-search and
tagging features one had to accept the curses UI as well.

>                                            If I switch to an
> 'all-in-one' label-state mail client, like notmuch, I want to be sure
> that in 2 years from now if I happen to decide to change to something
> else (I'm hoping this wont EVER happen because notmuch is very
> promising, but I need to be honest based on past experiences here), then
> I'm going to want to make sure that all of my mail is marked as read,
> deleted mail is deleted and even though I was using labels for
> organizational purposes in notmuch, things are still organized in some
> way appropriate to folders on the filesystem.

I appreciate your caution before making the commitment to a mail
client. I think that's very wise. [*]

And I think that for the case of "I'm giving up on notmuch and want to
switch to something else" you can be quite assured that notmuch will
allow you to take care of everything you need. At a system level, it's
really an almost trivial matter to implement everything you describe
above as small shell scripts based on "notmuch search" commands. And I
can only imagine support for that kind of thing getting better all the
time.

> The way it is now, if I switch to notmuch and then try to switch back,
> my life is a total mess because all of the state is contained within the
> notmuch database, that is frightening for the long-term, but it also
> makes me very worried about simple corruption of that data store. If I
> lose that state, I'm totally screwed. At least in a maildir scenario, if
> I got corruption in one place it might cause me to lose one email, but
> if I get corruption in my notmuch database, I had better have a recent
> backup or I am screwed. 

I highly recommend making very regular backups of the output of "notmuch
dump". It's a quick process to run, and the file it creates is not
large. It's also nicely sorted so that if you are doing some kind of
incremental backup, that should work well.

> I like to think that this concept of label-state, indexable
> storage-backed mail clients is the dawn of a new age, just as maildir
> was to mbox, but I'm still scared because there is no mb2md equivalent
> yet.

I think we're really close to where you could write a notmuch2md script
as a very tiny shell script:

for tag in $(notmuch search --for=tags *); do
	notmuch search --for=messages --output=maildir:/some/dir/$tag tag:$tag
done

Being able to do that kind of scriptable output is pretty powerful. And
we're not missing anything fundamental in the system to be able to
support that, (just a little bit of support for the new command-line
options like --for and --output).

-Carl

[*] I know I went through a similarly cautious evaluation when switching
away from CVS. CVS made the transition away so painful that I was
determined to choose a system that satisfied me on two criteria:

1. The system seemed well-designed enough that I could imagine it
   surviving "forever".

2. That when realities exceeded my imagination, the system wouldn't make
   it hard for me to switch away.

So far I'm still quite happy with git on both points.
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