# How to...

Some tips about how to do some useful things with notmuch, and the
various "third party" notmuch utilities.

[[!toc levels=2]]

## <span id="debian_packages">**Debian squeeze packages outdated**</span>

The notmuch package(s) in Debian squeeze are very old (version 0.3).
It's better to start off with an up to date version from
[backports](http://backports-master.debian.org/).

## <span id="receive_mail">**Receive mail**</span>

Notmuch does not fetch mail for you.  For that, you need to use an
external mail syncing utility.  Some recommended utilities are listed
below.

Notmuch requires that every individual message be in it's own file.
The well-supported [maildir](http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html) or
"mh"-style storage formats are compatible with notmuch.  Basically any
setup in which each mail is in a file of its own will work.  The older
mbox mail store formats is not supported, but fortunately it is very
easy to [[convert mbox to maildir|howto/#mbox]] .  The following
utilities support these formats:

* [offlineimap](http://offlineimap.org/) -
  quite useful and widely tested, it also offers a handy hook that
  will come in useful a bit later in our setup.  Also supports
  "presynchook" and "postsynchook" command that will get run
  whenever you sync.  Point _postsynchook_ to a script that gets run
  on every sync and that will do the automatic updating and tagging
  of your notmuch database.

* [mbsync](http://isync.sourceforge.net/)

* [getmail](http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/)

* [fetchmail](http://fetchmail.berlios.de/)

See the [[initial_tagging]] page for more info on initial tagging of
messages.

## <span id="sync_maildir_flags">**Sync notmuch tags and maildir flags**</span>

notmuch has the ability to synchronize maildir flags and respective tags in both
directions. For more information on maildir flags see the [maildir
page](http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html), and for the respective tags see your
notmuch configuration file. This feature is enabled by default, but if you don't
need it, it is simple to disable it with the 'notmuch config' command:

        $ notmuch config set maildir.synchronize_flags false

The maildir flags may, in turn, be synchronized with IMAP flags by another tool,
such as offlineimap.

For safety reasons, and because
[[notmuch does not support delete operations|deleting]], notmuch does
not sync the "trashed" flag.  For discussion on this topic please
refer to the mailing list.

## <span id="python">**Use notmuch from python**</span>

Notmuch includes python bindings to the notmuch shared library. Please
refer to the nice and extensive
[notmuch python API documentation](http://notmuch.readthedocs.org/).

The bindings are very simple to use.  As an example, given you have
the python bindings installed (or simply set your PYTHONPATH
environment variable to point to the .../bindings/python directory),
this snippet will produce a list of mails matching the given
expression:

        >>> import notmuch
        >>> db = notmuch.Database()
        >>> query = db.create_query('tag:inbox AND NOT tag:killed')
        >>> list(query.search_messages()) # doctest:+ELLIPSIS
        [...]

## <span id="print_filenames">**Using notmuch with Mutt**</span>

See [[notmuch-mutt]].

## <span id="reapply_auto">**Automatically retagging the database (e.g., when upgrading versions)**</span>

Certain versions of notmuch include new automatic tags (for example, between
0.3 and 0.10, automatic tagging of signed and encrypted messages was added).
However, for users running with databases created in older versions of
notmuch, these tags are missing in pre-existing messages and need to be
added.  One way to do this is as follows:

        $ notmuch dump --output=~/out.nm
        $ mv ~/Mail/.notmuch ~/.notmuch.bak
        $ notmuch new
        $ notmuch tag -inbox -unread '*'
        $ notmuch restore --accumulate --input=~/out.nm

At this point, one should run a sanity check on the tags, and if everything
has merged correctly, the ~/.notmuch.bak directory is expendable, as is
~/out.nm.

## <span id="mbox">**Dealing with mbox and other formats**</span>

notmuch by itself is unable to handle non-maildir mail archives.  One tool
to solve this is called mb2md.  Assuming an mbox in ~/test.mbox and ones
mail archives to be in ~/Mail, an invocation would look like

        $ mb2md -s ~/test.mbox -d ~/Mail/mynewmaildirname

Note that specifying the paths for -s and -d is necessary.  This will create
a new maildir in ~/Mail/mynewmaildirname from the mbox at ~/test.mbox.

Often the formats are more convoluted, however.  Many lists provide an
almost-but-not-quite-mbox format that mailman produces, as can be seen, for
example, [here](http://lists.xapian.org/pipermail/xapian-devel/).  These
files can be converted with some degree of success to mbox using the script
found
[here](http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/converting-mailman-gzipd-text-archive-files-to-proper-mbox-files),
and from mbox to maildir as above.

However, many of these lists also have a gmane version, which, where it
exists, achieves far better results than dealing with the messy mailman
output.  Using the instructions from [Gmane's
site](http://gmane.org/export.php), we can download an mbox file, which we
can then convert to maildir using mb2md or other utility.

## <span id="special_tags">**Take advantage of tags that are special to notmuch**</span>

See [[tags special to notmuch|special-tags]].