+
+* <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.
+
+
+* <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