X-Git-Url: https://git.cworth.org/git?a=blobdiff_plain;f=howto.mdwn;h=16d1ddd38eade748f37cd80c419a08883620309f;hb=879df316752d69945562ab6c54ebf09f40a1a678;hp=0e75acc82bdc4b2aee8f9e957c6e8047a90d07a7;hpb=d7c70a64d61ced5fca65ebf0cc998625994da538;p=notmuch-wiki
diff --git a/howto.mdwn b/howto.mdwn
index 0e75acc..16d1ddd 100644
--- a/howto.mdwn
+++ b/howto.mdwn
@@ -26,26 +26,25 @@ various "third party" notmuch utilities.
* [fetchmail](http://fetchmail.berlios.de/)
- See the [[initial_tagging]] page for more info on intial tagging of messages.
+ See the [[initial_tagging]] page for more info on initial tagging of messages.
-* **Print only filenames of a search (python bindings)**
+* **Use notmuch from python**
- Notmuch includes [python bindings](http://pypi.python.org/pypi/notmuch)
- to the notmuch shared library. Extensive API documentation
- [is available](http://packages.python.org/notmuch).
+ Notmuch includes python bindings to the notmuch shared
+ library. Extensive API documentation [is
+ available](http://notmuchmail.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 script will print the filenames of a matching search:
+ this snippet will produce a list of mails matching the given
+ expression:
- #!/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()
+ >>> import notmuch
+ >>> db = notmuch.Database()
+ >>> query = db.create_query('tag:inbox AND NOT tag:killed')
+ >>> list(query.search_messages()) # doctest:+ELLIPSIS
+ [...]
* **Sync notmuch tags and maildir flags**
@@ -114,3 +113,28 @@ various "third party" notmuch utilities.
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.
+
+* **Dealing with mbox and other formats**
+
+ 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.