[[!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](http://software.complete.org/software/projects/show/offlineimap) - 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_taggin) 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).