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.
174 By default, results will be displayed in reverse chronological order,
175 (that is, the newest results will be displayed first).
179 section below for details of the supported syntax for <search-terms>.
182 .BR show " [options...] <search-term>..."
184 Shows all messages matching the search terms.
186 The messages will be grouped and sorted based on the threading (all
187 replies to a particular message will appear immediately after that
188 message in date order). The output is not indented by default, but
189 depth tags are printed so that proper indentation can be performed by
190 a post-processor (such as the emacs interface to notmuch).
192 Supported options for
197 .B \-\-entire\-thread
199 By default only those messages that match the search terms will be
200 displayed. With this option, all messages in the same thread as any
201 matched message will be displayed.
205 The output format is plain-text, with all text-content MIME parts
206 decoded. Various components in the output,
207 .RB ( message ", " header ", " body ", " attachment ", and MIME " part ),
208 will be delimited by easily-parsed markers. Each marker consists of a
209 Control-L character (ASCII decimal 12), the name of the marker, and
210 then either an opening or closing brace, ('{' or '}'), to either open
211 or close the component.
215 is to display a single thread of email messages. For this, use a
216 search term of "thread:<thread-id>" as can be seen in the first
217 column of output from the
223 section below for details of the supported syntax for <search-terms>.
229 command is useful for preparing a template for an email reply.
232 .BR reply " [options...] <search-term>..."
234 Constructs a reply template for a set of messages.
236 To make replying to email easier,
238 takes an existing set of messages and constructs a suitable mail
239 template. The Reply-to header (if any, otherwise From:) is used for
240 the To: address. Vales from the To: and Cc: headers are copied, but
241 not including any of the current user's email addresses (as configured
242 in primary_mail or other_email in the .notmuch-config file) in the
245 It also builds a suitable new subject, including Re: at the front (if
246 not already present), and adding the message IDs of the messages being
247 replied to to the References list and setting the In-Reply-To: field
250 Finally, the original contents of the emails are quoted by prefixing
251 each line with '> ' and included in the body.
253 The resulting message template is output to stdout.
255 Supported options for
260 .BR \-\-format= ( default | headers\-only )
264 Includes subject and quoted message body.
267 Only produces In-Reply-To, References, To, Cc, and Bcc headers.
272 section below for details of the supported syntax for <search-terms>.
274 Note: It is most common to use
276 with a search string matching a single message, (such as
277 id:<message-id>), but it can be useful to reply to several messages at
278 once. For example, when a series of patches are sent in a single
279 thread, replying to the entire thread allows for the reply to comment
280 on issue found in multiple patches.
286 command is the only command available for manipulating database
291 .BR tag " +<tag>|-<tag> [...] [--] <search-term>..."
293 Add/remove tags for all messages matching the search terms.
295 Tags prefixed by '+' are added while those prefixed by '-' are
296 removed. For each message, tag removal is performed before tag
299 The beginning of <search-terms> is recognized by the first
300 argument that begins with neither '+' nor '-'. Support for
301 an initial search term beginning with '+' or '-' is provided
302 by allowing the user to specify a "--" argument to separate
303 the tags from the search terms.
307 section below for details of the supported syntax for <search-terms>.
311 .BR dump " and " restore
312 commands can be used to create a textual dump of email tags for backup
313 purposes, and to restore from that dump
317 .BR dump " [<filename>]"
319 Creates a plain-text dump of the tags of each message.
321 The output is to the given filename, if any, or to stdout.
323 These tags are the only data in the notmuch database that can't be
324 recreated from the messages themselves. The output of notmuch dump is
325 therefore the only critical thing to backup (and much more friendly to
326 incremental backup than the native database files.)
328 .BR restore " <filename>"
330 Restores the tags from the given file (see
331 .BR "notmuch dump" "."
333 Note: The dump file format is specifically chosen to be
334 compatible with the format of files produced by sup-dump.
335 So if you've previously been using sup for mail, then the
337 command provides you a way to import all of your tags (or labels as
340 Several notmuch commands accept a common syntax for search terms.
342 The search terms can consist of free-form text (and quoted phrases)
343 which will match all messages that contain all of the given
344 terms/phrases in the body, the subject, or any of the sender or
347 In addition to free text, the following prefixes can be used to force
348 terms to match against specific portions of an email, (where
349 <brackets> indicate user-supplied values):
351 from:<name-or-address>
355 subject:<word-or-quoted-phrase>
367 prefix is used to match the name or address of the sender of an email
372 prefix is used to match the names or addresses of any recipient of an
373 email message, (whether To, Cc, or Bcc).
375 Any term prefixed with
377 will match only text from the subject of an email. Searching for a
378 phrase in the subject is supported by including quotation marks around
379 the phrase, immediately following
384 prefix can be used to search for specific filenames (or extensions) of
385 attachments to email messages.
389 valid tag values include
390 .BR inbox " and " unread
391 by default for new messages added by
393 as well as any other tag values added manually with
398 message ID values are the literal contents of the Message-ID: header
399 of email messages, but without the '<', '>' delimiters.
403 prefix can be used with the thread ID values that are generated
404 internally by notmuch (and do not appear in email messages). These
405 thread ID values can be seen in the first column of output from
408 In addition to individual terms, multiple terms can be
409 combined with Boolean operators (
410 .BR and ", " or ", " not
411 , etc.). Each term in the query will be implicitly connected by a
412 logical AND if no explicit operator is provided, (except that terms
413 with a common prefix will be implicitly combined with OR until we get
414 Xapian defect #402 fixed).
416 Parentheses can also be used to control the combination of the Boolean
417 operators, but will have to be protected from interpretation by the
418 shell, (such as by putting quotation marks around any parenthesized
421 Finally, results can be restricted to only messages within a
422 particular time range, (based on the Date: header) with a syntax of:
424 <intial-timestamp>..<final-timestamp>
426 Each timestamp is a number representing the number of seconds since
427 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC. This is not the most convenient means of
428 expressing date ranges, but until notmuch is fixed to accept a more
429 convenient form, one can use the date program to construct
430 timestamps. For example, with the bash shell the folowing syntax would
431 specify a date range to return messages from 2009-10-01 until the
434 $(date +%s -d 2009-10-01)..$(date +%s)
436 The emacs-based interface to notmuch (available as
438 in the Notmuch distribution).
441 .B http://notmuchmail.org
443 Feel free to send questions, comments, or kudos to the notmuch mailing
444 list <notmuch@notmuchmail.org> . Subscription is not required before
445 posting, but is available from the notmuchmail.org website.
447 Real-time interaction with the Notmuch community is available via IRC
448 (server: irc.freenode.net, channel: #notmuch).