Dreaming of tag-based e-mailing

[David Bremner]

"Fernando H. F. Botelho" <fernando.botelho at f123.org> writes:

> 1. I tag incoming messages with any number of arbitrary tags, and these 
> get assigned not just to that specific e-mail message, but also to the 
> contact (i.e. email address) behind it.
> 2. I decide I have a message to send to every person that has tag A, B, 
> D, F, and Z, and I select those and the e-mail client allows me to 
> e-mail my message to every contact that has all of those tags.

Notmuch does not (currently) deal with contacts as first class
entities. There are some scripts and extensions that search the database
of mail messages and extract contact information, but currently there is
no way within notmuch to add tags to contacts.

What you are interested in could be done, but it would require some
programming. It is true that your goal sounds a bit CRM-like; on the
other hand most CRM systems are probably too large and complex to be
comfortable for a single user. As far as I know they are also typically
browser based (whether that is good or bad depends on you).

> By that I mean, that I need to know if I should ask for help 
> from someone that knows C, Python, PHP, or something else, or if that 
> someone has to be a big Mutt fan, or SugarCRM, or Thunderbird, etc.

The core of notmuch is in C and C++. There are bindings for several
languages, with python being the most used. 'alot' is one notmuch-based
mail user agent written in python. As far as I know, the most popular
way to use notmuch is via the emacs front-end; to customize this one
would need to use emacs-lisp.

> I am also trying to find a solution that would run on Gnome or the Gnome 
> Terminal as KDE is not accessible to the Orca screen reader right now.

Any text based program should work find in the Gnome Terminal.

Mutt is another, much older mail-user-agent, which I personally don't
know much about. The next version of notmuch will ship with some
integration scripts for mutt and notmuch. There is also the 'mutt-kz'
project, to rewrite mutt with a notmuch back-end.

Hope this helps,

David