[[!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.
+[[!toc levels=2]]
+
## <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 its own will work. Here are some generally
-well-regarded mail retrieval tools:
+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](https://github.com/nicolas33/offlineimap/) -
+* [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
* [getmail](http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/)
-* [fetchmail](http://fetchmail.berlios.de/)
+* [fetchmail](http://www.fetchmail.info/)
-See the [[initial_tagging]] page for more info on initial tagging of messages.
+* [muchsync](http://www.muchsync.org/) - replicate and synchronize
+ your notmuch database (mail and tags) across machines
-## <span id="python">**Use notmuch from python**</span>
+* [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.
-Notmuch includes python bindings to the notmuch shared
-library. Extensive API documentation [is
-available](http://notmuch.readthedocs.org/).
+If you prefer a simpler solution like msmtp, first
+[install and configure msmtp](http://msmtp.sourceforge.net/).
-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:
+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
- >>> 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 (but please consider updating to a more recent version
-of notmuch; in addition to maildir tag syncing, it contains many
-useful new features, and several important bug fixes):
-
-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 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
-(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).
+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:
-## <span id="print_filenames">**Using notmuch with Mutt**</span>
+ $ notmuch config set maildir.synchronize_flags false
-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 not seamless, but fairly straightforward.
-There are two principal possibilities, each with its own ups and downs:
-
-* Using mutt-notmuch, which will create a "virtual" maildir folder with
- search results whenever a search is made. The upside is that you can
- search all your folders simultanously; the downside is that your
- modifications in the results listing do not carry over, also having
- to switch folders comes with some more annoyances.
-
- 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. 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>
-
-* Using a simple macro that will emulate the "limit" mutt functionality
- using notmuch.
-
- See the [**alternative notmuch integration**](http://log.or.cz/?p=228)
- blog post for instructions and details,
- or simply put these two macros to your muttrc:
-
- # 'L' performs a notmuch query, showing only the results
- macro index L "<enter-command>unset wait_key<enter><shell-escape>read -p 'notmuch query: ' x; echo \$x >~/.cache/mutt_terms<enter><limit>~i \"\`notmuch search --output=messages \$(cat ~/.cache/mutt_terms) | head -n 600 | perl -le '@a=<>;chomp@a;s/\^id:// for@a;$,=\"|\";print@a'\`\"<enter>" "show only messages matching a notmuch pattern"
- # 'a' shows all messages again (supersedes default <alias> binding)
- macro index a "<limit>all\n" "show all messages (undo limit)"
-
- The upside (if you are used to working in the context of a single folder)
- is that this really does use the limit functionality of mutt
- and you are still in your original folder.
- The downside is that this approach has scaling problems
- and works well only for reasonably specific queries.
+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>
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
+ $ notmuch dump --output=$HOME/out.nm
+ $ mv ~/Mail/.notmuch ~/.notmuch.bak
+ $ notmuch new
+ $ notmuch tag -inbox -unread '*'
+ $ notmuch restore --accumulate --input=$HOME/out.nm
At this point, one should run a sanity check on the tags, and if everything
has merged correctly, the ~/.notmuch.bak directory is expendable, as is
-~/out.nm.
+$HOME/out.nm.
-## <span id="nbox">**Dealing with mbox and other formats**</span>
+## <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
+ $ 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.
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