Unexpected output of "notmuch new --quiet"

Ralph Seichter abbot at monksofcool.net
Fri Apr 19 16:46:30 PDT 2019


* Daniel Kahn Gillmor:

> as far as maildir goes, i think notmuch probably *shouldn't* be
> looking at stuff in …/tmp/ -- right?

You're right, I don't see why Notmuch would peek into "tmp".

> I'd be sad if those files went away, but perhaps you're right that
> we should only be looking at are things within any cur/ and new/
> subfolders within the message archive.

I don't mean to reduce Notmuch usability to get rid of a few unwanted
messages on stderr. What I suggest is to consider all files outside of
"cur" and "new" to be legitimate non-mail files by default. If Notmuch
chooses to inspect them and detects valid messages, then fine, but the
default assumption should be non-mail.

Think about how the files get there. You manually dumping some *.eml
files in a directory is not exactly typical, IMO. ;-) I expect that in
the majority of cases there is some MTA or fetchmail-like process
storing mail files in a Maildir structure (flat, tree, or mixed like
Dovecot does).

I think that altering Notmuch's expectations about files outside of
well-known subdirectories should be possible without sacrificing its
flexibility.

-Ralph


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