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 runs (other than the first run) will skip any read-only directories,
115 so you can use that to mark directories that will not receive any new
122 with no command argument will run
126 has previously been completed, but
128 has not previously been run.
131 Several of the notmuch commands accept search terms with a common
134 section below for more details on the supported syntax.
137 .BR search " and "show
138 commands are used to query the email database.
141 .BR search " [options...] <search-term>..."
143 Search for messages matching the given search terms, and display as
144 results the threads containing the matched messages.
146 The output consists of one line per thread, giving a thread ID, the
147 date of the newest (or oldest, depending on the sort option) matched
148 message in the thread, the number of matched messages and total
149 messages in the thread, the names of all participants in the thread,
150 and the subject of the newest (or oldest) message.
152 Supported options for
157 .BR \-\-sort= ( newest\-first | oldest\-first )
159 This option can be used to present results in either chronological order
160 .RB ( oldest\-first )
161 or reverse chronological order
162 .RB ( newest\-first ).
164 Note: The thread order will be distinct between these two options
165 (beyond being simply reversed). When sorting by
167 the threads will be sorted by the oldest message in each thread, but
170 the threads will be sorted by the newest message in each thread.
172 By default, results will be displayed in reverse chronological order,
173 (that is, the newest results will be displayed first).
177 section below for details of the supported syntax for <search-terms>.
180 .BR show " <search-term>..."
182 Shows all messages matching the search terms.
184 The messages will be grouped and sorted based on the threading (all
185 replies to a particular message will appear immediately after that
186 message in date order). The output is not indented by default, but
187 depth tags are printed so that proper indentation can be performed by
188 a post-processor (such as the emacs interface to notmuch).
190 The output format is plain-text, with all text-content MIME parts
191 decoded. Various components in the output,
192 .RB ( message ", " header ", " body ", " attachment ", and MIME " part ),
193 will be delimited by easily-parsed markers. Each marker consists of a
194 Control-L character (ASCII decimal 12), the name of the marker, and
195 then either an opening or closing brace, ('{' or '}'), to either open
196 or close the component.
200 is to display a single thread of email messages. For this, use a
201 search term of "thread:<thread-id>" as can be seen in the first
202 column of output from the
208 section below for details of the supported syntax for <search-terms>.
213 command is useful for preparing a template for an email reply.
216 .BR reply " <search-term>..."
218 Constructs a reply template for a set of messages.
220 To make replying to email easier,
222 takes an existing set of messages and constructs a suitable mail
223 template. The Reply-to header (if any, otherwise From:) is used for
224 the To: address. Vales from the To: and Cc: headers are copied, but
225 not including any of the current user's email addresses (as configured
226 in primary_mail or other_email in the .notmuch-config file) in the
229 It also builds a suitable new subject, including Re: at the front (if
230 not already present), and adding the message IDs of the messages being
231 replied to to the References list and setting the In-Reply-To: field
234 Finally, the original contents of the emails are quoted by prefixing
235 each line with '> ' and included in the body.
237 The resulting message template is output to stdout.
241 section below for details of the supported syntax for <search-terms>.
243 Note: It is most common to use
245 with a search string matching a single message, (such as
246 id:<message-id>), but it can be useful to reply to several messages at
247 once. For example, when a series of patches are sent in a single
248 thread, replying to the entire thread allows for the reply to comment
249 on issue found in multiple patches.
254 command is the only command available for manipulating database
259 .BR tag " +<tag>|-<tag> [...] [--] <search-term>..."
261 Add/remove tags for all messages matching the search terms.
263 Tags prefixed by '+' are added while those prefixed by '-' are
264 removed. For each message, tag removal is performed before tag
267 The beginning of <search-terms> is recognized by the first
268 argument that begins with neither '+' nor '-'. Support for
269 an initial search term beginning with '+' or '-' is provided
270 by allowing the user to specify a "--" argument to separate
271 the tags from the search terms.
275 section below for details of the supported syntax for <search-terms>.
279 .BR dump " and " restore
280 commands can be used to create a textual dump of email tags for backup
281 purposes, and to restore from that dump
285 .BR dump " [<filename>]"
287 Creates a plain-text dump of the tags of each message.
289 The output is to the given filename, if any, or to stdout.
291 These tags are the only data in the notmuch database that can't be
292 recreated from the messages themselves. The output of notmuch dump is
293 therefore the only critical thing to backup (and much more friendly to
294 incremental backup than the native database files.)
296 .BR restore " <filename>"
298 Restores the tags from the given file (see
299 .BR "notmuch dump" "."
301 Note: The dump file format is specifically chosen to be
302 compatible with the format of files produced by sup-dump.
303 So if you've previously been using sup for mail, then the
305 command provides you a way to import all of your tags (or labels as
308 Several notmuch commands accept a common syntax for search terms.
310 The search terms can consist of free-form text (and quoted phrases)
311 which will match all messages that contain all of the given
312 terms/phrases in the body, the subject, or any of the sender or
315 In addition to free text, the following prefixes can be used to force
316 terms to match against specific portions of an email, (where
317 <brackets> indicate user-supplied values):
319 from:<name-or-address>
323 subject:<word-or-quoted-phrase>
335 prefix is used to match the name or address of the sender of an email
340 prefix is used to match the names or addresses of any recipient of an
341 email message, (whether To, Cc, or Bcc).
343 Any term prefixed with
345 will match only text from the subject of an email. Searching for a
346 phrase in the subject is supported by including quotation marks around
347 the phrase, immediately following
352 prefix can be used to search for specific filenames (or extensions) of
353 attachments to email messages.
357 valid tag values include
358 .BR inbox " and " unread
359 by default for new messages added by
361 as well as any other tag values added manually with
366 message ID values are the literal contents of the Message-ID: header
367 of email messages, but without the '<', '>' delimiters.
371 prefix can be used with the thread ID values that are generated
372 internally by notmuch (and do not appear in email messages). These
373 thread ID values can be seen in the first column of output from
376 In addition to individual terms, multiple terms can be
377 combined with Boolean operators (
378 .BR and ", " or ", " not
379 , etc.). Each term in the query will be implicitly connected by a
380 logical AND if no explicit operator is provided, (except that terms
381 with a common prefix will be implicitly combined with OR until we get
382 Xapian defect #402 fixed).
384 Parentheses can also be used to control the combination of the Boolean
385 operators, but will have to be protected from interpretation by the
386 shell, (such as by putting quotation marks around any parenthesized
389 Finally, results can be restricted to only messages within a
390 particular time range, (based on the Date: header) with a syntax of:
392 <intial-timestamp>..<final-timestamp>
394 Each timestamp is a number representing the number of seconds since
395 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC. This is not the most convenient means of
396 expressing date ranges, but until notmuch is fixed to accept a more
397 convenient form, one can use the date program to construct
398 timestamps. For example, with the bash shell the folowing syntax would
399 specify a date range to return messages from 2009-10-01 until the
402 $(date +%s -d 2009-10-01)..$(date +%s)
404 The emacs-based interface to notmuch (available as
406 in the Notmuch distribution).
409 .B http://notmuchmail.org
411 Feel free to send questions, comments, or kudos to the notmuch mailing
412 list <notmuch@notmuchmail.org> . Subscription is not required before
413 posting, but is available from the notmuchmail.org website.
415 Real-time interaction with the Notmuch community is available via IRC
416 (server: irc.freenode.net, channel: #notmuch).