# Why Notmuch?

* "Not much mail" is what Notmuch thinks about your email
  collection. Even if you receive 12000 messages per month or have on
  the order of millions of messages that you've been saving for
  decades. Regardless, Notmuch will be able to quickly search all of
  it. It's just plain not much mail.

* "Not much mail" is also what you should have in your inbox at any
  time. Notmuch gives you what you need, (tags and fast search), so
  that you can keep your inbox tamed and focus on what really matters
  in your life, (which is surely not email).

* Notmuch is an answer to <a href="http://sup.rubyforge.org/">Sup</a>.
  Sup is a very good email program written by William Morgan (and
  others) and is the direct inspiration for Notmuch. Notmuch began as
  an effort to rewrite performance-critical pieces of Sup in C rather
  than ruby. From there, it grew into a separate project. One
  significant contribution Notmuch makes compared to Sup is the
  separation of the indexer/searcher from the user interface. (Notmuch
  provides a library interface so that its indexing/searching/tagging
  features can be integrated into any email program.)

* Notmuch is not much of an email program. It doesn't receive messages
  (no POP or IMAP suport). It doesn't send messages (no mail composer,
  no network code at all). And for what it does do (email search) that
  work is provided by an external library, <a
  href="http://xapian.org/">Xapian</a>. So if Notmuch provides no user
  interface and Xapian does all the heavy lifting, then what's left
  here? Not much.  </ul>

Notmuch is still in the early stages of development, but there are
already three user interfaces available for it (one for emacs, one for
vim, and another using curses for running within a terminal). If
you've been looking for a fast, global-search and tag-based email
reader to use within your text editor or in a terminal, then Notmuch
may be exactly what you've been looking for.

Otherwise, if you're a developer of an existing email program and
would love a good library interface for fast, global search with
support for arbitrary tags, then Notmuch also may be exactly what
you've been looking for.

Either way, please feel free to jump in. All of the code for Notmuch
is available as <a
href="http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-sw.html">free
software</a> released under the GNU 
<a href="http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl.html">GPL version 
3</a>. The latest versions
can be checked out via git with this command:

	git clone git://notmuchmail.org/git/notmuch

Or you can browse the <a href="http://git.notmuchmail.org/git/notmuch">
Notmuch code history</a> online.

Patches are most welcome and should be sent to notmuch&#64;notmuchmail.org.
Please try to follow the [patch submission guidelines of the Git
project](http://repo.or.cz/w/git.git?a=blob;f=Documentation/SubmittingPatches;hb=HEAD)
when submitting patches to notmuch. We are currently test-driving a [Patchwork
instance](http://patchwork.notmuchmail.org/project/notmuch) to help us keep track
of [the patches](http://patchwork.notmuchmail.org/project/notmuch/list).

Comments? Please feel free to email the notmuch mailing list:
notmuch&#64;notmuchmail.org (subscription is not required, but you can
<a href="http://notmuchmail.org/mailman/listinfo/notmuch">subscribe to
the notmuch list</a> if you would like to). You can also browse the
<a href="http://notmuchmail.org/pipermail/notmuch/">online archives</a>
or the mailing list or download an <a href="http://notmuchmail.org/archives/notmuch.mbox">mbox file</a>
of the entire mailing-list. The mb2md utility can then be used to
convert the archives to maildir format which is convenient for
reading the archives within notmuch itself.

This wiki is maintained using [ikiwiki](http://ikiwiki.info). You can pull and
push changes using the following URL (no authentication necessary):

    git://notmuchmail.org/git/notmuch-wiki