Added information about mbox, gmane, and mailman format conversion.

[notmuch-wiki] / howto.mdwn

diff --git a/howto.mdwn b/howto.mdwn
index 0c2bd093483bc6f631538c6eee89c5654fccfe41..6db2a5b48e8fcfe45c269df8d84383ce37042a67 100644 (file)
--- a/howto.mdwn
+++ b/howto.mdwn
@@ -12,7 +12,7 @@ various "third party" notmuch utilities.
   is in a file of its own will work.  Here are some generally
   well-regarded mail retrieval tools:
 
-  * [offlineimap](https://github.com/jgoerzen/offlineimap/wiki/) -
+  * [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
@@ -97,3 +97,45 @@ various "third party" notmuch utilities.
   [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.