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.
7 * <span id="receive_mail">**Receive mail**</span>
9 Notmuch requires either [maildir
10 flag](http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html) or a "mh"-style
11 maildirectory to operate on. Basically any setup in which each mail
12 is in a file of its own will work. Here are some generally
13 well-regarded mail retrieval tools:
15 * [offlineimap](https://github.com/nicolas33/offlineimap/) -
16 quite useful and widely tested, it also offers a handy hook that
17 will come in useful a bit later in our setup. Also supports
18 "presynchook" and "postsynchook" command that will get run
19 whenever you sync. Point _postsynchook_ to a script that gets run
20 on every sync and that will do the automatic updating and tagging
21 of your notmuch database.
23 * [mbsync](http://isync.sourceforge.net/)
25 * [getmail](http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/)
27 * [fetchmail](http://fetchmail.berlios.de/)
29 See the [[initial_tagging]] page for more info on initial tagging of messages.
31 * <span id="python">**Use notmuch from python**</span>
33 Notmuch includes python bindings to the notmuch shared
34 library. Extensive API documentation [is
35 available](http://notmuch.readthedocs.org/).
37 The bindings are very simple to use. As an example, given you have
38 the python bindings installed (or simply set your PYTHONPATH
39 environment variable to point to the .../bindings/python directory),
40 this snippet will produce a list of mails matching the given
44 >>> db = notmuch.Database()
45 >>> query = db.create_query('tag:inbox AND NOT tag:killed')
46 >>> list(query.search_messages()) # doctest:+ELLIPSIS
49 * <span id="sync_maildir_flags">**Sync notmuch tags and maildir flags**</span>
51 notmuch **since version 0.5** syncs maildir flags and respective
52 tags in both directions. This part applies only to notmuch prior to
55 Some IMAP users rely on maildir flags that convey the status "seen",
56 "replied", "trashed", in order to synchronize the status of their
57 mail across mail clients (a [maildir
58 flag](http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html) is simply a defined part
59 of their filename). Notmuch will by default happily ignore those
60 flags and will never modify them either, as there is no built-in
61 support for synchronizing your notmuch tags with your imap maildir
62 flags (seen, replied, trashed, etc). However there are currently 2
63 ways in which you can achieve synchronization.
65 [notmuchsync](http://spaetz.github.com/notmuchsync/) is a utility
66 (based on the cnotmuch python bindings) that allows synchronization
67 in either direction, as well as pruning of deleted files.
69 The second solution allows for fast maildir flag to notmuch tag
70 synchronization (and only in that direction) requires patching the
71 notmuch source code. The patch has been posted in this mail
72 *id:1267450136-31749-1-git-send-email-Sebastian@SSpaeth.de* and can
73 be viewed as a [source diff in this git
74 repository](http://github.com/spaetz/notmuch-all-feature/commit/df3b087cefb85e9d16fd17540e348bcb854dd7ee).
76 * <span id="print_filenames">**Using notmuch with Mutt**</span>
78 Notmuch is a great mail indexing tool that can also be used *in conjunction*
79 with existing Mail User Agents (MUA) instead of replacing them. The advantage
80 of such mixed solutions is that users can benefit from notmuch features (such
81 as full-text search and thread reconstruction) without *having to* change
84 A popular geek MUA is [the Mutt e-mail client](http://www.mutt.org);
85 integrating notmuch with Mutt is not seamless, but fairly straightforward.
86 There are two principal possibilities, each with its own ups and downs:
88 * Using mutt-notmuch, which will create a "virtual" maildir folder with
89 search results whenever a search is made. The upside is that you can
90 search all your folders simultanously; the downside is that your
91 modifications in the results listing do not carry over, also having
92 to switch folders comes with some more annoyances.
95 [**how to use Notmuch with Mutt**](http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2011/01/how_to_use_Notmuch_with_Mutt/)
96 has been written by Stefano Zacchiroli. Check out the
97 [howto](http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2011/01/how_to_use_Notmuch_with_Mutt/)
100 <small>(Note by the howto author: I've linked the howto from this wiki rather
101 than splicing it in, in order to avoid duplication of information. If you
102 think it would be better to have it here, feel free to copy the text
104 [available](http://git.upsilon.cc/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=zack-homepage.git;a=history;f=blog/posts/2011/01/how_to_use_Notmuch_with_Mutt.mdwn)
105 in markdown syntax from the Git repository of my homepage.)</small>
107 * Using a simple macro that will emulate the "limit" mutt functionality
110 See the [**alternative notmuch integration**](http://log.or.cz/?p=228)
111 blog post for instructions and details,
112 or simply put these two macros to your muttrc:
114 # 'L' performs a notmuch query, showing only the results
115 macro index L "<enter-command>unset wait_key<enter><shell-escape>read -p 'notmuch query: ' x; echo \$x >~/.cache/mutt_terms<enter><limit>~i \"\`notmuch search --output=messages \$(cat ~/.cache/mutt_terms) | head -n 600 | perl -le '@a=<>;chomp@a;s/\^id:// for@a;$,=\"|\";print@a'\`\"<enter>" "show only messages matching a notmuch pattern"
116 # 'a' shows all messages again (supersedes default <alias> binding)
117 macro index a "<limit>all\n" "show all messages (undo limit)"
119 The upside (if you are used to working in the context of a single folder)
120 is that this really does use the limit functionality of mutt
121 and you are still in your original folder.
122 The downside is that this approach has scaling problems
123 and works well only for reasonably specific queries.
126 * <span id="reapply_auto">**Automatically retagging the database (e.g., when upgrading versions)**</span>
128 Certain versions of notmuch include new automatic tags (for example, between
129 0.3 and 0.10, automatic tagging of signed and encrypted messages was added).
130 However, for users running with databases created in older versions of
131 notmuch, these tags are missing in pre-existing messages and need to be
132 added. One way to do this is as follows:
134 $ notmuch dump ~/out.nm
135 $ mv ~/Mail/.notmuch ~/.notmuch.bak
137 $ notmuch tag -inbox -unread '*'
138 $ notmuch restore --accumulate ~/out.nm
140 At this point, one should run a sanity check on the tags, and if everything
141 has merged correctly, the ~/.notmuch.bak directory is expendable, as is
144 * <span id="nbox">**Dealing with mbox and other formats**</span>
146 notmuch by itself is unable to handle non-maildir mail archives. One tool
147 to solve this is called mb2md. Assuming an mbox in ~/test.mbox and ones
148 mail archives to be in ~/Mail, an invocation would look like
150 $ mb2md -s ~/test.mbox -d ~/Mail/mynewmaildirname
152 Note that specifying the paths for -s and -d is necessary. This will create
153 a new maildir in ~/Mail/mynewmaildirname from the mbox at ~/test.mbox.
155 Often the formats are more convoluted, however. Many lists provide an
156 almost-but-not-quite-mbox format that mailman produces, as can be seen, for
157 example, [here](http://lists.xapian.org/pipermail/xapian-devel/). These
158 files can be converted with some degree of success to mbox using the script
160 [here](http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/converting-mailman-gzipd-text-archive-files-to-proper-mbox-files),
161 and from mbox to maildir as above.
163 However, many of these lists also have a gmane version, which, where it
164 exists, achieves far better results than dealing with the messy mailman
165 output. Using the instructions from [Gmane's
166 site](http://gmane.org/export.php), we can download an mbox file, which we
167 can then convert to maildir using mb2md or other utility.
169 * <span id="special_tags">**Take advantage of tags that are special to notmuch**</span>
171 See [[tags special to notmuch|special-tags]].