[[!img notmuch-logo.png alt="Notmuch logo" class="left"]]
-#How to...
+# How to...
Some tips about how to do some useful things with notmuch, and the
various "third party" notmuch utilities.
-* <span id="receive_mail">**Receive mail**</span>
-
- 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.
-
-* <span id="print_filenames">**Print only filenames of a search (python bindings)**</span>
-
- 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()
-
-* <span id="sync_maildir_flags">**Sync notmuch tags and maildir flags**</span>
-
- 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).
+[[!toc levels=2]]
+
+## <span id="receive_mail">**Receive mail**</span>
+
+Notmuch does not fetch mail for you. For that, you need to use an
+external mail syncing utility. Some recommended utilities are listed
+below.
+
+Notmuch requires that every individual message be in its own file.
+The well-supported [maildir](http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html) or
+"mh"-style storage formats are compatible with notmuch. Basically any
+setup in which each mail is in a file of its own will work. The older
+mbox mail store formats is not supported, but fortunately it is very
+easy to [[convert mbox to maildir|howto/#mbox]] . The following
+utilities support these formats:
+
+* [offlineimap](http://offlineimap.org/) -
+ 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://www.fetchmail.info/)
+
+* [muchsync](http://www.muchsync.org/) - replicate and synchronize
+ your notmuch database (mail and tags) across machines
+
+* [lieer](https://github.com/gauteh/lieer) - Fast email-fetching and two-way tag
+ synchronization between notmuch and GMail (Note that lieer was formerly known
+ as gmailieer.)
+
+* [mujmap](https://github.com/elizagamedev/mujmap/) - synchronize
+ notmuch mail with a JMAP server, i.e. synchronizing tags with keywords
+ and mailboxes. Analogous to lieer, but for [JMAP](https://jmap.io)
+ supporting mail hosts.
+
+See more exhaustive list of [[software]] notmuch works with and the
+[[initial_tagging]] page for more info on initial tagging of messages.
+
+
+## <span id="send_mail">**Send mail**</span>
+
+Notmuch does not send your mail. The frontends (MUAs) that utilize notmuch
+does that. Often these MUAs use sendmail(8) to send your mail.
+
+If you prefer a simpler solution like msmtp, first
+[install and configure msmtp](http://msmtp.sourceforge.net/).
+
+Then create a symbolic link so that msmtp will be called instead of sendmail
+when you press the keyboard shortcut to send your message.
+
+ $ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/msmtp /usr/sbin/sendmail
+
+
+## <span id="sync_maildir_flags">**Sync notmuch tags and maildir flags**</span>
+
+notmuch has the ability to synchronize maildir flags and respective tags in both
+directions. For more information on maildir flags see the [maildir
+page](http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html) and [[Special tags|special-tags]], and for the respective tags see your
+notmuch configuration file. This feature is enabled by default, but if you don't
+need it, it is simple to disable it with the 'notmuch config' command:
+
+ $ notmuch config set maildir.synchronize_flags false
+
+The maildir flags may, in turn, be synchronized with IMAP flags by another tool,
+such as offlineimap.
+
+For safety reasons, and because
+[[notmuch does not support delete operations|deleting]], notmuch does
+not sync the "trashed" flag. For discussion on this topic please
+refer to the mailing list.
+
+## <span id="python">**Use notmuch from python**</span>
+
+See the [[Notmuch Library Language Bindings|bindings]] page.
+
+## <span id="print_filenames">**Using notmuch with Mutt**</span>
+
+See [[notmuch-mutt]].
+
+## <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 --output=$HOME/out.nm
+ $ mv ~/Mail/.notmuch ~/.notmuch.bak
+ $ notmuch new
+ $ notmuch tag -inbox -unread '*'
+ $ notmuch restore --accumulate --input=$HOME/out.nm
+
+At this point, one should run a sanity check on the tags, and if everything
+has merged correctly, the ~/.notmuch.bak directory is expendable, as is
+$HOME/out.nm.
+
+## <span id="mbox">**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.
+
+Please note that mail delivered by Postfix will have envelope headers
+that may cause notmuch to complain about "single-message mbox files".
+Removing the first line from the message or passing it through
+reformail will solve the problem.
+
+## <span id="special_tags">**Take advantage of tags that are special to notmuch**</span>
+
+See [[tags special to notmuch|special-tags]].
+
+
+## <span id="special_tags">**Index all your gpg-encrypted email**</span>
+
+If you don't mind replacing your encrypted emails with cleartext versions and
+re-indexing them, there are some scripts that do that at
+[github](https://github.com/mmehnert/maildir-decrypt) . That would make sense
+in a scenario where you have encrypted your hard disk anyway and are
+comfortable with the security implications (and until notmuch can index
+encrypted email itself).
+
+## <span id="special_tags">**Index and search emails written in CJK scripts**</span>
+
+CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) languages do not use spaces for word
+separation. The full-text indexer (Xapian) must first perform word segmentation
+on the sentence in its TermGenerator. Otherwise, large amount of long terms
+will be included in the database, leading to extremely slow indexing and
+ineffective searching with CJK search terms.
+
+Xapian supports [N-gram](https://xapian.org/docs/sourcedoc/html/classXapian_1_1TermGenerator.html)
+term generator [since 2011](https://u7fa9.org/memo/HEAD/archives/2012-06/2012-06-01.rst)
+to as a simple substitute for word segmentation. It can be turned on by
+setting the environment variable
+
+ $ export XAPIAN_CJK_NGRAM=1
+ $ notmuch new
+
+For existing databases, one can reindex the database (since notmuch 0.26)
+with
+
+ $ export XAPIAN_CJK_NGRAM=1
+ $ notmuch reindex '*'
+
+Xapian has an on-going [pull-request](https://github.com/xapian/xapian/pull/114)
+that adds support for real CJK word-segmentation based on the ICU library.
+When it gets merged, one probably will gets better indexing and searching
+results with this new method.
+
+## Translations
+
+- A translation of this page into [[Russian|howto-ru]]
projects / notmuch-wiki / blobdiff