[[!img notmuch-logo.png alt="Notmuch logo" class="left"]]
#How to...
Some tips about how to do some useful things with notmuch, and the
various "third party" notmuch utilities.
* **Receive mail**
Notmuch requires either [maildir
flag](http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html) or a "mh"-style
maildirectory to operate on. Basically any setup in which each mail
is in a file of it's own will work. Here are some generally
well-regarded mail retrieval tools:
* [offlineimap](https://github.com/jgoerzen/offlineimap/wiki/) -
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](/initial_tagging) for more info on intial tagging of messages.
* **Print only filenames of a search (python bindings)**
Notmuch includes python bindings to the notmuch shared library,
called [cnotmuch](http://pypi.python.org/pypi/cnotmuch). Extensive
API documentation available.
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 script will print the filenames of a matching search:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
import notmuch
search = " ".join(sys.argv[1:])
q = notmuch.Database().create_query(search)
for m in q.search_messages():
print m.get_filename()
* **Sync notmuch tags and maildir flags**
Some IMAP users rely on maildir flags that convey the status "seen",
"replied", "trashed", in order to synchronize the status of their
mail across mail clients (a [maildir
flag](http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html) is simply a defined part
of their filename). Notmuch will by default happily ignore those
flags and will never modify them either, as there is no built-in
support for sunchronizing your notmuch tags with your imap maildir
flags (seen, replied, trashed, etc). However there are currently 2
ways in which you can achieve synchronization.
[notmuchsync](http://spaetz.github.com/notmuchsync/) is a utility
(based on the cnotmuch python bindings) that allows synchronization
in either direction, as well as pruning of deleted files.
The second solution allows for fast maildir flag to notmuch tag
synchronization (and only in that direction) requires patching the
notmuch source code. The patch has been posted in this mail
*id:1267450136-31749-1-git-send-email-Sebastian@SSpaeth.de* and can
be viewed as a [source diff in this git
repository](http://github.com/spaetz/notmuch-all-feature/commit/df3b087cefb85e9d16fd17540e348bcb854dd7ee).