Notmuch indexing takes too long

[Patrick Totzke]

Hi Ondrej,

Quoting Ondrej Jombik (2012-11-09 02:58:09)
> I am trying to move from mairix to some better solution. mairix has been
> working really well for me, but it had some limitations.
> 
> I decided to give a try to notmuch, but I has been suprised with
> estimated indexing time:
> 
>      Processed 4157 of 822462 files (10h 3m 42s remaining).
> 
> At the beggining when there was 11 hours estimate I simply thought that
> those numbers are wrong. But they are not. This is really going to take
> that long. I could not believe that you all wait that long to index your
> maildirs:)
> 
> Also if I understand correctly the concept, whenever I want to
> regenerate database, I have to move old away and create new one,
> correct? mairix worked that way that you run it and it updated its own
> database. Is it possible with notmuch as well? I simply do not want to
> wait 10+ hours for every database regeneration, thought I am willing to
> wait that long for initial indexing.

Notmuch does incremental idnex updates once the initial index is build.
The initial indexing takes a while, depending on the number of mails you have
but 10 *hours* seems a little off. For me its ~5mins on the hdd and <2 on a ssd.

> My last question is related to notmuch and Alpine. Alpine is
> a IMAP/Maildir e-mail client based on old PINE. I get used to that so
> much that I cannot move away (to Mutt, for example). Is there anyone who
> uses notmuch with Alpine and created some scripts and/or key-bindings?

You might want to have a look at notmuchfs: https://github.com/tsto/notmuchfs
Also, there are a few other MUAs based on notmuch:
Check out http://notmuchmail.org/frontends/

Have fun,
/p