Some tips about how to do some useful things with notmuch, and the
various "third party" notmuch utilities.
-* <span id="print_filenames">Print only filenames of a search</span>
+* <span id="receive_mail">**Receive mail**</span>
- 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:
+ 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 its own will work. Here are some generally
+ well-regarded mail retrieval tools:
- #!/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()
+ * [offlineimap](https://github.com/nicolas33/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.
-* <span id="sync_maildir_flags">Sync notmuch tags and maildir flags</span>
+ * [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="python">**Use notmuch from python**</span>
+
+ Notmuch includes python bindings to the notmuch shared
+ library. Extensive API documentation [is
+ available](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="sync_maildir_flags">**Sync notmuch tags and maildir flags**</span>
+
+ notmuch **since version 0.5** syncs maildir flags and respective
+ tags in both directions. This part applies only to notmuch prior to
+ version 0.5:
Some IMAP users rely on maildir flags that convey the status "seen",
"replied", "trashed", in order to synchronize the status of their
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
+ support for synchronizing 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
- that allows synchronization in either direction, as well as pruning
- of deleted files.
+ (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
be viewed as a [source diff in this git
repository](http://github.com/spaetz/notmuch-all-feature/commit/df3b087cefb85e9d16fd17540e348bcb854dd7ee).
+* <span id="print_filenames">**Using notmuch with Mutt**</span>
+
+ Notmuch is a great mail indexing tool that can also be used *in conjunction*
+ with existing Mail User Agents (MUA) instead of replacing them. The advantage
+ of such mixed solutions is that users can benefit from notmuch features (such
+ as full-text search and thread reconstruction) without *having to* change
+ MUA.
+
+ A popular geek MUA is [the Mutt e-mail client](http://www.mutt.org);
+ integrating notmuch with Mutt is fairly straightforward. An
+ [**how to use Notmuch with Mutt**](http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2011/01/how_to_use_Notmuch_with_Mutt/)
+ has been written by Stefano Zacchiroli, together with some glue code. Check
+ out the
+ [howto](http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2011/01/how_to_use_Notmuch_with_Mutt/)
+ for more information.
+
+ <small>(Note by the howto author: I've linked the howto from this wiki rather
+ than splicing it in, in order to avoid duplication of information. If you
+ think it would be better to have it here, feel free to copy the text
+ here. The howto is
+ [available](http://git.upsilon.cc/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=zack-homepage.git;a=history;f=blog/posts/2011/01/how_to_use_Notmuch_with_Mutt.mdwn)
+ in markdown syntax from the Git repository of my homepage.)</small>
+
+* <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 ~/out.nm
+ $ mv ~/Mail/.notmuch ~/.notmuch.bak
+ $ notmuch new
+ $ notmuch tag -inbox -unread '*'
+ $ notmuch restore --accumulate ~/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="nbox">**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]].
projects / notmuch-wiki / blobdiff