notmuch Digest, Vol 20, Issue 57

[Sander Boer]

Carl Worth <cworth at cworth.org> writes:> 

[snip]

> 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).
>

I agree that this is the key issue here. 
I was hoping that google somehow was able to expose the tags in the "All
Mail" folder, like the headers that are gmail specific: X-pstn-nxpr and X-pstn-nxp (which contains a
hash) for instance.


> 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
>
ah, I have the ubuntu version,  will update to git soon.


> 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


now using gnus still, b/c notmuch does not build for the N900 (bummer)

-- 
Sander Boer