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 \-\-format= ( json | text )
151 Presents the results in either JSON or plain-text (default).
155 .BR \-\-sort= ( newest\-first | oldest\-first )
157 This option can be used to present results in either chronological order
158 .RB ( oldest\-first )
159 or reverse chronological order
160 .RB ( newest\-first ).
162 Note: The thread order will be distinct between these two options
163 (beyond being simply reversed). When sorting by
165 the threads will be sorted by the oldest message in each thread, but
168 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 " [options...] <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 Supported options for
195 .B \-\-entire\-thread
197 By default only those messages that match the search terms will be
198 displayed. With this option, all messages in the same thread as any
199 matched message will be displayed.
204 .B \-\-format=(json|text)
210 The default plain-text format has text-content MIME parts
211 decoded. Various components in the output,
212 .RB ( message ", " header ", " body ", " attachment ", and MIME " part ),
213 will be delimited by easily-parsed markers. Each marker consists of a
214 Control-L character (ASCII decimal 12), the name of the marker, and
215 then either an opening or closing brace, ('{' or '}'), to either open
216 or close the component.
223 Format output as Javascript Object Notation (JSON). JSON output always
224 includes all messages in a matching thread; in effect
227 .B \-\-entire\-thread
232 is to display a single thread of email messages. For this, use a
233 search term of "thread:<thread-id>" as can be seen in the first
234 column of output from the
240 section below for details of the supported syntax for <search-terms>.
246 command is useful for preparing a template for an email reply.
249 .BR reply " [options...] <search-term>..."
251 Constructs a reply template for a set of messages.
253 To make replying to email easier,
255 takes an existing set of messages and constructs a suitable mail
256 template. The Reply-to header (if any, otherwise From:) is used for
257 the To: address. Vales from the To: and Cc: headers are copied, but
258 not including any of the current user's email addresses (as configured
259 in primary_mail or other_email in the .notmuch-config file) in the
262 It also builds a suitable new subject, including Re: at the front (if
263 not already present), and adding the message IDs of the messages being
264 replied to to the References list and setting the In-Reply-To: field
267 Finally, the original contents of the emails are quoted by prefixing
268 each line with '> ' and included in the body.
270 The resulting message template is output to stdout.
272 Supported options for
277 .BR \-\-format= ( default | headers\-only )
281 Includes subject and quoted message body.
284 Only produces In-Reply-To, References, To, Cc, and Bcc headers.
289 section below for details of the supported syntax for <search-terms>.
291 Note: It is most common to use
293 with a search string matching a single message, (such as
294 id:<message-id>), but it can be useful to reply to several messages at
295 once. For example, when a series of patches are sent in a single
296 thread, replying to the entire thread allows for the reply to comment
297 on issue found in multiple patches.
303 command is the only command available for manipulating database
308 .BR tag " +<tag>|-<tag> [...] [--] <search-term>..."
310 Add/remove tags for all messages matching the search terms.
312 Tags prefixed by '+' are added while those prefixed by '-' are
313 removed. For each message, tag removal is performed before tag
316 The beginning of <search-terms> is recognized by the first
317 argument that begins with neither '+' nor '-'. Support for
318 an initial search term beginning with '+' or '-' is provided
319 by allowing the user to specify a "--" argument to separate
320 the tags from the search terms.
324 section below for details of the supported syntax for <search-terms>.
328 .BR dump " and " restore
329 commands can be used to create a textual dump of email tags for backup
330 purposes, and to restore from that dump
334 .BR dump " [<filename>]"
336 Creates a plain-text dump of the tags of each message.
338 The output is to the given filename, if any, or to stdout.
340 These tags are the only data in the notmuch database that can't be
341 recreated from the messages themselves. The output of notmuch dump is
342 therefore the only critical thing to backup (and much more friendly to
343 incremental backup than the native database files.)
345 .BR restore " <filename>"
347 Restores the tags from the given file (see
348 .BR "notmuch dump" "."
350 Note: The dump file format is specifically chosen to be
351 compatible with the format of files produced by sup-dump.
352 So if you've previously been using sup for mail, then the
354 command provides you a way to import all of your tags (or labels as
357 Several notmuch commands accept a common syntax for search terms.
359 The search terms can consist of free-form text (and quoted phrases)
360 which will match all messages that contain all of the given
361 terms/phrases in the body, the subject, or any of the sender or
364 In addition to free text, the following prefixes can be used to force
365 terms to match against specific portions of an email, (where
366 <brackets> indicate user-supplied values):
368 from:<name-or-address>
372 subject:<word-or-quoted-phrase>
384 prefix is used to match the name or address of the sender of an email
389 prefix is used to match the names or addresses of any recipient of an
390 email message, (whether To, Cc, or Bcc).
392 Any term prefixed with
394 will match only text from the subject of an email. Searching for a
395 phrase in the subject is supported by including quotation marks around
396 the phrase, immediately following
401 prefix can be used to search for specific filenames (or extensions) of
402 attachments to email messages.
406 valid tag values include
407 .BR inbox " and " unread
408 by default for new messages added by
410 as well as any other tag values added manually with
415 message ID values are the literal contents of the Message-ID: header
416 of email messages, but without the '<', '>' delimiters.
420 prefix can be used with the thread ID values that are generated
421 internally by notmuch (and do not appear in email messages). These
422 thread ID values can be seen in the first column of output from
425 In addition to individual terms, multiple terms can be
426 combined with Boolean operators (
427 .BR and ", " or ", " not
428 , etc.). Each term in the query will be implicitly connected by a
429 logical AND if no explicit operator is provided, (except that terms
430 with a common prefix will be implicitly combined with OR until we get
431 Xapian defect #402 fixed).
433 Parentheses can also be used to control the combination of the Boolean
434 operators, but will have to be protected from interpretation by the
435 shell, (such as by putting quotation marks around any parenthesized
438 Finally, results can be restricted to only messages within a
439 particular time range, (based on the Date: header) with a syntax of:
441 <intial-timestamp>..<final-timestamp>
443 Each timestamp is a number representing the number of seconds since
444 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC. This is not the most convenient means of
445 expressing date ranges, but until notmuch is fixed to accept a more
446 convenient form, one can use the date program to construct
447 timestamps. For example, with the bash shell the folowing syntax would
448 specify a date range to return messages from 2009-10-01 until the
451 $(date +%s -d 2009-10-01)..$(date +%s)
453 The following environment variables can be used to control the
457 Specifies the location of the notmuch configuration file. Notmuch will
458 use ${HOME}/.notmuch-config if this variable is not set.
460 The emacs-based interface to notmuch (available as
462 in the Notmuch distribution).
465 .B http://notmuchmail.org
467 Feel free to send questions, comments, or kudos to the notmuch mailing
468 list <notmuch@notmuchmail.org> . Subscription is not required before
469 posting, but is available from the notmuchmail.org website.
471 Real-time interaction with the Notmuch community is available via IRC
472 (server: irc.freenode.net, channel: #notmuch).