1 [[!img notmuch-logo.png alt="Notmuch logo" class="left"]]
4 Some tips about how to do some useful things with notmuch, and the
5 various "third party" notmuch utilities.
9 ## <span id="receive_mail">**Receive mail**</span>
11 Notmuch does not fetch mail for you. For that, you need to use an
12 external mail syncing utility. Some recommended utilities are listed
15 Notmuch requires that every individual message be in its own file.
16 The well-supported [maildir](http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html) or
17 "mh"-style storage formats are compatible with notmuch. Basically any
18 setup in which each mail is in a file of its own will work. The older
19 mbox mail store formats is not supported, but fortunately it is very
20 easy to [[convert mbox to maildir|howto/#mbox]] . The following
21 utilities support these formats:
23 * [offlineimap](http://offlineimap.org/) -
24 quite useful and widely tested, it also offers a handy hook that
25 will come in useful a bit later in our setup. Also supports
26 "presynchook" and "postsynchook" command that will get run
27 whenever you sync. Point _postsynchook_ to a script that gets run
28 on every sync and that will do the automatic updating and tagging
29 of your notmuch database.
31 * [mbsync](http://isync.sourceforge.net/)
33 * [getmail](http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/)
35 * [fetchmail](http://www.fetchmail.info/)
37 * [muchsync](http://www.muchsync.org/) - replicate and synchronize
38 your notmuch database (mail and tags) across machines
40 * [lieer](https://github.com/gauteh/lieer) - Fast email-fetching and two-way tag
41 synchronization between notmuch and GMail (Note that lieer was formerly known
44 See more exhaustive list of [[software]] notmuch works with and the
45 [[initial_tagging]] page for more info on initial tagging of messages.
48 ## <span id="send_mail">**Send mail**</span>
50 Notmuch does not send your mail. The frontends (MUAs) that utilize notmuch
51 does that. Often these MUAs use sendmail(8) to send your mail.
53 If you prefer a simpler solution like msmtp, first
54 [install and configure msmtp](http://msmtp.sourceforge.net/).
56 Then create a symbolic link so that msmtp will be called instead of sendmail
57 when you press the keyboard shortcut to send your message.
59 $ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/msmtp /usr/sbin/sendmail
62 ## <span id="sync_maildir_flags">**Sync notmuch tags and maildir flags**</span>
64 notmuch has the ability to synchronize maildir flags and respective tags in both
65 directions. For more information on maildir flags see the [maildir
66 page](http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html) and [[Special tags|special-tags]], and for the respective tags see your
67 notmuch configuration file. This feature is enabled by default, but if you don't
68 need it, it is simple to disable it with the 'notmuch config' command:
70 $ notmuch config set maildir.synchronize_flags false
72 The maildir flags may, in turn, be synchronized with IMAP flags by another tool,
75 For safety reasons, and because
76 [[notmuch does not support delete operations|deleting]], notmuch does
77 not sync the "trashed" flag. For discussion on this topic please
78 refer to the mailing list.
80 ## <span id="python">**Use notmuch from python**</span>
82 See the [[Notmuch Library Language Bindings|bindings]] page.
84 ## <span id="print_filenames">**Using notmuch with Mutt**</span>
88 ## <span id="reapply_auto">**Automatically retagging the database (e.g., when upgrading versions)**</span>
90 Certain versions of notmuch include new automatic tags (for example, between
91 0.3 and 0.10, automatic tagging of signed and encrypted messages was added).
92 However, for users running with databases created in older versions of
93 notmuch, these tags are missing in pre-existing messages and need to be
94 added. One way to do this is as follows:
96 $ notmuch dump --output=$HOME/out.nm
97 $ mv ~/Mail/.notmuch ~/.notmuch.bak
99 $ notmuch tag -inbox -unread '*'
100 $ notmuch restore --accumulate --input=$HOME/out.nm
102 At this point, one should run a sanity check on the tags, and if everything
103 has merged correctly, the ~/.notmuch.bak directory is expendable, as is
106 ## <span id="mbox">**Dealing with mbox and other formats**</span>
108 notmuch by itself is unable to handle non-maildir mail archives. One tool
109 to solve this is called mb2md. Assuming an mbox in ~/test.mbox and ones
110 mail archives to be in ~/Mail, an invocation would look like
112 $ mb2md -s ~/test.mbox -d ~/Mail/mynewmaildirname
114 Note that specifying the paths for -s and -d is necessary. This will create
115 a new maildir in ~/Mail/mynewmaildirname from the mbox at ~/test.mbox.
117 Often the formats are more convoluted, however. Many lists provide an
118 almost-but-not-quite-mbox format that mailman produces, as can be seen, for
119 example, [here](http://lists.xapian.org/pipermail/xapian-devel/). These
120 files can be converted with some degree of success to mbox using the script
122 [here](http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/converting-mailman-gzipd-text-archive-files-to-proper-mbox-files),
123 and from mbox to maildir as above.
125 However, many of these lists also have a gmane version, which, where it
126 exists, achieves far better results than dealing with the messy mailman
127 output. Using the instructions from [Gmane's
128 site](http://gmane.org/export.php), we can download an mbox file, which we
129 can then convert to maildir using mb2md or other utility.
131 Please note that mail delivered by Postfix will have envelope headers
132 that may cause notmuch to complain about "single-message mbox files".
133 Removing the first line from the message or passing it through
134 reformail will solve the problem.
136 ## <span id="special_tags">**Take advantage of tags that are special to notmuch**</span>
138 See [[tags special to notmuch|special-tags]].
141 ## <span id="special_tags">**Index all your gpg-encrypted email**</span>
143 If you don't mind replacing your encrypted emails with cleartext versions and
144 re-indexing them, there are some scripts that do that at
145 [github](https://github.com/mmehnert/maildir-decrypt) . That would make sense
146 in a scenario where you have encrypted your hard disk anyway and are
147 comfortable with the security implications (and until notmuch can index
148 encrypted email itself).
150 ## <span id="special_tags">**Index and search emails written in CJK scripts**</span>
152 CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) languages do not use spaces for word
153 separation. The full-text indexer (Xapian) must first perform word segmentation
154 on the sentence in its TermGenerator. Otherwise, large amount of long terms
155 will be included in the database, leading to extremely slow indexing and
156 ineffective searching with CJK search terms.
158 Xapian supports [N-gram](https://xapian.org/docs/sourcedoc/html/classXapian_1_1TermGenerator.html)
159 term generator [since 2011](https://u7fa9.org/memo/HEAD/archives/2012-06/2012-06-01.rst)
160 to as a simple substitute for word segmentation. It can be turned on by
161 setting the environment variable
163 $ export XAPIAN_CJK_NGRAM=1
166 For existing databases, one can reindex the database (since notmuch 0.26)
169 $ export XAPIAN_CJK_NGRAM=1
170 $ notmuch reindex '*'
172 Xapian has an on-going [pull-request](https://github.com/xapian/xapian/pull/114)
173 that adds support for real CJK word-segmentation based on the ICU library.
174 When it gets merged, one probably will gets better indexing and searching
175 results with this new method.
179 - A translation of this page into [[Russian|howto-ru]]