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 2009-10-31 "Notmuch 0.1"
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 The quickest way to get started with Notmuch is to simply invoke the
31 command with no arguments, which will interactively guide you through
32 the process of indexing your mail.
34 While the command-line program
36 provides powerful functionality, it does not provide the most
37 convenient interface for that functionality. More sophisticated
38 interfaces are expected to be built on top of either the command-line
39 interface, or more likely, on top of the notmuch library
40 interface. See http://notmuchmail.org for more about alternate
41 interfaces to notmuch.
45 command is used to configure Notmuch for first use, (or to reconfigure
51 Interactively sets up notmuch for first use.
53 The setup command will prompt for your full name, your primary email
54 address, any alternate email addresses you use, and the directory
55 containing your email archives. Your answers will be written to a
56 configuration file in ${NOTMUCH_CONFIG} (if set) or
57 ${HOME}/.notmuch-config . This configuration file will be created with
58 descriptive comments, making it easy to edit by hand later to change the
59 configuration. Or you can run
61 again to change the configuration.
63 The mail directory you specify can contain any number of
64 sub-directories and should primarily contain only files with individual
65 email messages (eg. maildir or mh archives are perfect). If there are
66 other, non-email files (such as indexes maintained by other email
67 programs) then notmuch will do its best to detect those and ignore
70 Mail storage that uses mbox format, (where one mbox file contains many
71 messages), will not work with notmuch. If that's how your mail is
72 currently stored, it is recommended you first convert it to maildir
73 format with a utility such as mb2md before running
78 with no command argument will run
80 if the setup command has not previously been completed.
85 command is used to incorporate new mail into the notmuch database.
90 Find and import any new messages to the database.
94 command scans all sub-directories of the database, performing
95 full-text indexing on new messages that are found. Each new message
96 will automatically be tagged with both the
97 .BR inbox " and " unread
102 once after first running
104 to create the initial database. The first run may take a long time if
105 you have a significant amount of mail (several hundred thousand
106 messages or more). Subsequently, you should run
108 whenever new mail is delivered and you wish to incorporate it into the
109 database. These subsequent runs will be much quicker than the initial
114 with no command argument will run
118 has previously been completed, but
120 has not previously been run.
123 Several of the notmuch commands accept search terms with a common
126 section below for more details on the supported syntax.
129 .BR search " and "show
130 commands are used to query the email database.
133 .BR search " [options...] <search-term>..."
135 Search for messages matching the given search terms, and display as
136 results the threads containing the matched messages.
138 The output consists of one line per thread, giving a thread ID, the
139 date of the newest (or oldest, depending on the sort option) matched
140 message in the thread, the number of matched messages and total
141 messages in the thread, the names of all participants in the thread,
142 and the subject of the newest (or oldest) message.
144 Supported options for
149 .BR \-\-sort= ( newest\-first | oldest\-first )
151 This option can be used to present results in either chronological order
152 .RB ( oldest\-first )
153 or reverse chronological order
154 .RB ( newest\-first ).
156 Note: The thread order will be distinct between these two options
157 (beyond being simply reversed). When sorting by
159 the threads will be sorted by the oldest message in each thread, but
162 the threads will be sorted by the newest message in each thread.
166 By default, results will be displayed in reverse chronological order,
167 (that is, the newest results will be displayed first).
171 section below for details of the supported syntax for <search-terms>.
174 .BR show " [options...] <search-term>..."
176 Shows all messages matching the search terms.
178 The messages will be grouped and sorted based on the threading (all
179 replies to a particular message will appear immediately after that
180 message in date order). The output is not indented by default, but
181 depth tags are printed so that proper indentation can be performed by
182 a post-processor (such as the emacs interface to notmuch).
184 Supported options for
189 .B \-\-entire\-thread
191 By default only those messages that match the search terms will be
192 displayed. With this option, all messages in the same thread as any
193 matched message will be displayed.
197 The output format is plain-text, with all text-content MIME parts
198 decoded. Various components in the output,
199 .RB ( message ", " header ", " body ", " attachment ", and MIME " part ),
200 will be delimited by easily-parsed markers. Each marker consists of a
201 Control-L character (ASCII decimal 12), the name of the marker, and
202 then either an opening or closing brace, ('{' or '}'), to either open
203 or close the component.
207 is to display a single thread of email messages. For this, use a
208 search term of "thread:<thread-id>" as can be seen in the first
209 column of output from the
215 section below for details of the supported syntax for <search-terms>.
221 command is useful for preparing a template for an email reply.
224 .BR reply " [options...] <search-term>..."
226 Constructs a reply template for a set of messages.
228 To make replying to email easier,
230 takes an existing set of messages and constructs a suitable mail
231 template. The Reply-to header (if any, otherwise From:) is used for
232 the To: address. Vales from the To: and Cc: headers are copied, but
233 not including any of the current user's email addresses (as configured
234 in primary_mail or other_email in the .notmuch-config file) in the
237 It also builds a suitable new subject, including Re: at the front (if
238 not already present), and adding the message IDs of the messages being
239 replied to to the References list and setting the In-Reply-To: field
242 Finally, the original contents of the emails are quoted by prefixing
243 each line with '> ' and included in the body.
245 The resulting message template is output to stdout.
247 Supported options for
252 .BR \-\-format= ( default | headers\-only )
256 Includes subject and quoted message body.
259 Only produces In-Reply-To, References, To, Cc, and Bcc headers.
264 section below for details of the supported syntax for <search-terms>.
266 Note: It is most common to use
268 with a search string matching a single message, (such as
269 id:<message-id>), but it can be useful to reply to several messages at
270 once. For example, when a series of patches are sent in a single
271 thread, replying to the entire thread allows for the reply to comment
272 on issue found in multiple patches.
278 command is the only command available for manipulating database
283 .BR tag " +<tag>|-<tag> [...] [--] <search-term>..."
285 Add/remove tags for all messages matching the search terms.
287 Tags prefixed by '+' are added while those prefixed by '-' are
288 removed. For each message, tag removal is performed before tag
291 The beginning of <search-terms> is recognized by the first
292 argument that begins with neither '+' nor '-'. Support for
293 an initial search term beginning with '+' or '-' is provided
294 by allowing the user to specify a "--" argument to separate
295 the tags from the search terms.
299 section below for details of the supported syntax for <search-terms>.
303 .BR dump " and " restore
304 commands can be used to create a textual dump of email tags for backup
305 purposes, and to restore from that dump
309 .BR dump " [<filename>]"
311 Creates a plain-text dump of the tags of each message.
313 The output is to the given filename, if any, or to stdout.
315 These tags are the only data in the notmuch database that can't be
316 recreated from the messages themselves. The output of notmuch dump is
317 therefore the only critical thing to backup (and much more friendly to
318 incremental backup than the native database files.)
320 .BR restore " <filename>"
322 Restores the tags from the given file (see
323 .BR "notmuch dump" "."
325 Note: The dump file format is specifically chosen to be
326 compatible with the format of files produced by sup-dump.
327 So if you've previously been using sup for mail, then the
329 command provides you a way to import all of your tags (or labels as
332 Several notmuch commands accept a common syntax for search terms.
334 The search terms can consist of free-form text (and quoted phrases)
335 which will match all messages that contain all of the given
336 terms/phrases in the body, the subject, or any of the sender or
339 In addition to free text, the following prefixes can be used to force
340 terms to match against specific portions of an email, (where
341 <brackets> indicate user-supplied values):
343 from:<name-or-address>
347 subject:<word-or-quoted-phrase>
359 prefix is used to match the name or address of the sender of an email
364 prefix is used to match the names or addresses of any recipient of an
365 email message, (whether To, Cc, or Bcc).
367 Any term prefixed with
369 will match only text from the subject of an email. Searching for a
370 phrase in the subject is supported by including quotation marks around
371 the phrase, immediately following
376 prefix can be used to search for specific filenames (or extensions) of
377 attachments to email messages.
381 valid tag values include
382 .BR inbox " and " unread
383 by default for new messages added by
385 as well as any other tag values added manually with
390 message ID values are the literal contents of the Message-ID: header
391 of email messages, but without the '<', '>' delimiters.
395 prefix can be used with the thread ID values that are generated
396 internally by notmuch (and do not appear in email messages). These
397 thread ID values can be seen in the first column of output from
400 In addition to individual terms, multiple terms can be
401 combined with Boolean operators (
402 .BR and ", " or ", " not
403 , etc.). Each term in the query will be implicitly connected by a
404 logical AND if no explicit operator is provided, (except that terms
405 with a common prefix will be implicitly combined with OR until we get
406 Xapian defect #402 fixed).
408 Parentheses can also be used to control the combination of the Boolean
409 operators, but will have to be protected from interpretation by the
410 shell, (such as by putting quotation marks around any parenthesized
413 Finally, results can be restricted to only messages within a
414 particular time range, (based on the Date: header) with a syntax of:
416 <intial-timestamp>..<final-timestamp>
418 Each timestamp is a number representing the number of seconds since
419 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC. This is not the most convenient means of
420 expressing date ranges, but until notmuch is fixed to accept a more
421 convenient form, one can use the date program to construct
422 timestamps. For example, with the bash shell the folowing syntax would
423 specify a date range to return messages from 2009-10-01 until the
426 $(date +%s -d 2009-10-01)..$(date +%s)
428 The emacs-based interface to notmuch (available as
430 in the Notmuch distribution).
433 .B http://notmuchmail.org
435 Feel free to send questions, comments, or kudos to the notmuch mailing
436 list <notmuch@notmuchmail.org> . Subscription is not required before
437 posting, but is available from the notmuchmail.org website.
439 Real-time interaction with the Notmuch community is available via IRC
440 (server: irc.freenode.net, channel: #notmuch).