+[[!img notmuch-logo.png alt="Notmuch logo" class="left"]]
# How to...
Some tips about how to do some useful things with notmuch, and the
[[!toc levels=2]]
-## <span id="debian_packages">**Debian squeeze packages outdated**</span>
-
-The notmuch package(s) in Debian squeeze are very old (version 0.3).
-It's better to start off with an up to date version from
-[backports](http://backports-master.debian.org/).
-
## <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 it's own file.
+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
* [getmail](http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/)
-* [fetchmail](http://fetchmail.berlios.de/)
+* [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
-See the [[initial_tagging]] page for more info on initial tagging of
-messages.
## <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 for the respective tags see your
+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="python">**Use notmuch from python**</span>
-Notmuch includes python bindings to the notmuch shared library. Please
-refer to the nice and extensive
-[notmuch python API documentation](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
- [...]
+See the [[Notmuch Library Language Bindings|bindings]] page.
## <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 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.
-
+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
+ $ notmuch dump --output=$HOME/out.nm
$ mv ~/Mail/.notmuch ~/.notmuch.bak
$ notmuch new
$ notmuch tag -inbox -unread '*'
- $ notmuch restore --accumulate ~/out.nm
+ $ 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="mbox">**Dealing with mbox and other formats**</span>
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