-Welcome to your new wiki.
+# Why Notmuch?
-All wikis are supposed to have a [[SandBox]], so this one does too.
+* "Not much mail" is what Notmuch thinks about your email
+ collection. Even if you receive 12000 messages per month or have on
+ the order of millions of messages that you've been saving for
+ decades. Regardless, Notmuch will be able to quickly search all of
+ it. It's just plain not much mail.
-----
+* "Not much mail" is also what you should have in your inbox at any
+ time. Notmuch gives you what you need, (tags and fast search), so
+ that you can keep your inbox tamed and focus on what really matters
+ in your life, (which is surely not email).
-This wiki is powered by [[ikiwiki]].
+* Notmuch is an answer to <a href="http://sup.rubyforge.org/">Sup</a>.
+ Sup is a very good email program written by William Morgan (and
+ others) and is the direct inspiration for Notmuch. Notmuch began as
+ an effort to rewrite performance-critical pieces of Sup in C rather
+ than ruby. From there, it grew into a separate project. One
+ significant contribution Notmuch makes compared to Sup is the
+ separation of the indexer/searcher from the user interface. (Notmuch
+ provides a library interface so that its indexing/searching/tagging
+ features can be integrated into any email program.)
+
+* Notmuch is not much of an email program. It doesn't receive messages
+ (no POP or IMAP suport). It doesn't send messages (no mail composer,
+ no network code at all). And for what it does do (email search) that
+ work is provided by an external library, <a
+ href="http://xapian.org/">Xapian</a>. So if Notmuch provides no user
+ interface and Xapian does all the heavy lifting, then what's left
+ here? Not much. </ul>
+
+Notmuch is still in the early stages of development, but there are
+already three user interfaces available for it (one for emacs, one for
+vim, and another using curses for running within a terminal). If
+you've been looking for a fast, global-search and tag-based email
+reader to use within your text editor or in a terminal, then Notmuch
+may be exactly what you've been looking for.
+
+Otherwise, if you're a developer of an existing email program and
+would love a good library interface for fast, global search with
+support for arbitrary tags, then Notmuch also may be exactly what
+you've been looking for.
+
+Either way, please feel free to jump in. All of the code for Notmuch
+is available as <a
+href="http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-sw.html">free
+software</a> released under the GNU
+<a href="http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl.html">GPL version
+3</a>. The latest versions
+can be checked out via git with this command:
+
+ git clone git://notmuchmail.org/git/notmuch
+
+Or you can browse the <a href="http://git.notmuchmail.org/git/notmuch">
+Notmuch code history</a> online.
+
+Patches are most welcome and should be sent to notmuch@notmuchmail.org.
+Please try to follow the [patch submission guidelines of the Git
+project](http://repo.or.cz/w/git.git?a=blob;f=Documentation/SubmittingPatches;hb=HEAD)
+when submitting patches to notmuch. We are currently test-driving a [Patchwork
+instance](http://patchwork.notmuchmail.org/project/notmuch) to help us keep track
+of [the patches](http://patchwork.notmuchmail.org/project/notmuch/list).
+
+Comments? Please feel free to email the notmuch mailing list:
+notmuch@notmuchmail.org (subscription is not required, but you can
+<a href="http://notmuchmail.org/mailman/listinfo/notmuch">subscribe to
+the notmuch list</a> if you would like to). You can also browse the
+<a href="http://notmuchmail.org/pipermail/notmuch/">online archives</a>
+or the mailing list or download an <a href="http://notmuchmail.org/archives/notmuch.mbox">mbox file</a>
+of the entire mailing-list. The mb2md utility can then be used to
+convert the archives to maildir format which is convenient for
+reading the archives within notmuch itself.
+
+This wiki is maintained using [ikiwiki](http://ikiwiki.info). You can pull and
+push changes using the following URL (no authentication necessary):
+
+ git://notmuchmail.org/git/notmuch-wiki
projects / notmuch-wiki / blobdiff