notmuch Digest, Vol 20, Issue 57

[Carl Worth]

On Mon, 27 Jun 2011 09:43:41 +0200, Sander Boer <sanderboer at mauc.nl> wrote:
> For instance, is this a possibility sync gmail tags with notmuch tags ?
> As fas as I am aware Gmail exposes its tags through imap folders, I am
> not too thrilled about the mixing of paradigms (folders vs tags) and it
> would be great if it could be aligned.

I'm not a gmail user myself, but I can describe some of the options
available.

First, it's important to understand that any friction here comes from
Gmail exposing its tags as folders, (which in turn could be the lack of
availability of a more tag-aware protocol than imap).

So, let's say you've done an imap-based fetch of all of your mail and
now have it in several folders corresponding to the various tags you
made in the Gmail interface, (and you've run "notmuch new" to create a
notmuch database of all of that).

At that point, you can search (with current notmuch from git---and soon
to be released as notmuch 0.6) on the folder names. This allows you to
do a search based on a Gmail tag. For example, you might have an
"important" tag in Gmail which you could search with:

	notmuch search folder:important

If you wanted to make an actual notmuch tag based on those search
results, you could do that as well:

	notmuch tag +important folder:important

And you could even do that on a regular basis, (for example in some
script that sucks down new email from Gmail). In this case you might
want to avoid re-tagging pre-tagged mail by amending the search terms:

	notmuch tag +important folder:important and not tag:important

(Note that this is an optimization that notmuch could be making
automatically, and that's something I'd love to see happen in notmuch at
some point.)

Hopefully it's clear enough that you could do the above in a script that
loops over all of your existing tags.

And if you were doing a one-time switch from Gmail to notmuch that would
be all you would need.

I don't know if you're looking to also push tags added via some notmuch
interface back to Gmail, (does Gmail even provide a mechanism for doing
that?). If so, then you'd need something that took notmuch tags and made
copies of the message in the appropriate files. That would hopefully be
easy to script based on the output of:

	notmuch search --output=files tag:important

I think my short answer is that it's fairly easy to convert from Gmail
tags to notmuch tags as part of a one-time import. Doing this on a
continual basis might benefit from writing a few scripts, and I don't
know if anyone has written those scripts yet.

Would any Gmail+notmuch users care to add anything to the conversation?

-Carl

-- 
carl.d.worth at intel.com
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