1 .\" notmuch - Not much of an email program, (just index, search and tagging)
3 .\" Copyright © 2009 Carl Worth
5 .\" Notmuch is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
6 .\" it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
7 .\" the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
8 .\" (at your option) any later version.
10 .\" Notmuch is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
11 .\" but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
12 .\" MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
13 .\" GNU General Public License for more details.
15 .\" You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
16 .\" along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ .
18 .\" Author: Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org>
19 .TH NOTMUCH 1 2011-12-04 "Notmuch 0.10.2"
21 notmuch \- thread-based email index, search, and tagging
24 .IR command " [" args " ...]"
26 Notmuch is a command-line based program for indexing, searching,
27 reading, and tagging large collections of email messages.
29 This page describes how to get started using notmuch from the command
30 line, and gives a brief overview of the commands available. For more
33 consult the \fBnotmuch-show\fR(1) man page, also accessible via
36 The quickest way to get started with Notmuch is to simply invoke the
38 command with no arguments, which will interactively guide you through
39 the process of indexing your mail.
41 While the command-line program
43 provides powerful functionality, it does not provide the most
44 convenient interface for that functionality. More sophisticated
45 interfaces are expected to be built on top of either the command-line
46 interface, or more likely, on top of the notmuch library
47 interface. See http://notmuchmail.org for more about alternate
48 interfaces to notmuch. The emacs-based interface to notmuch (available under
50 in the Notmuch source distribution) is probably the most widely used at
60 command is used to configure Notmuch for first use, (or to reconfigure
63 The setup command will prompt for your full name, your primary email
64 address, any alternate email addresses you use, and the directory
65 containing your email archives. Your answers will be written to a
66 configuration file in ${NOTMUCH_CONFIG} (if set) or
67 ${HOME}/.notmuch-config . This configuration file will be created with
68 descriptive comments, making it easy to edit by hand later to change the
69 configuration. Or you can run
71 again to change the configuration.
73 The mail directory you specify can contain any number of
74 sub-directories and should primarily contain only files with individual
75 email messages (eg. maildir or mh archives are perfect). If there are
76 other, non-email files (such as indexes maintained by other email
77 programs) then notmuch will do its best to detect those and ignore
80 Mail storage that uses mbox format, (where one mbox file contains many
81 messages), will not work with notmuch. If that's how your mail is
82 currently stored, it is recommended you first convert it to maildir
83 format with a utility such as mb2md before running
88 with no command argument will run
90 if the setup command has not previously been completed.
95 Several of the notmuch commands accept search terms with a common
98 section below for more details on the supported syntax.
101 .BR search ", " show " and " count
102 commands are used to query the email database.
106 command is useful for preparing a template for an email reply.
110 command is the only command available for manipulating database
115 .BR dump " and " restore
116 commands can be used to create a textual dump of email tags for backup
117 purposes, and to restore from that dump.
121 command can be used to get or set settings int the notmuch
125 The following environment variables can be used to control the
129 Specifies the location of the notmuch configuration file. Notmuch will
130 use ${HOME}/.notmuch\-config if this variable is not set.
134 .B http://notmuchmail.org
136 Feel free to send questions, comments, or kudos to the notmuch mailing
137 list <notmuch@notmuchmail.org> . Subscription is not required before
138 posting, but is available from the notmuchmail.org website.
140 Real-time interaction with the Notmuch community is available via IRC
141 (server: irc.freenode.net, channel: #notmuch).