X-Git-Url: https://git.cworth.org/git?p=notmuch-wiki;a=blobdiff_plain;f=howto.mdwn;h=584d89df2e26b5087d1f19fcacb93485abc0e02e;hp=f0673087f3cfb474c07dd5d90b8b187455c9b333;hb=HEAD;hpb=22f25b55898bee292bb841b9baec2865de470122 diff --git a/howto.mdwn b/howto.mdwn index f067308..584d89d 100644 --- a/howto.mdwn +++ b/howto.mdwn @@ -1,99 +1,184 @@ [[!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. -* **Receive mail** - - 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: - - * [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 - whenever you sync. Point _postsynchook_ to a script that gets run - on every sync and that will do the automatic updating and tagging - of your notmuch database. - - * [mbsync](http://isync.sourceforge.net/) - - * [getmail](http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/) - - * [fetchmail](http://fetchmail.berlios.de/) - - See the [[initial_tagging]] page for more info on intial tagging of messages. - -* **Print only filenames of a search (python bindings)** - - Notmuch includes [python bindings](http://pypi.python.org/pypi/notmuch) - to the notmuch shared library. Extensive API documentation - [is available](http://packages.python.org/notmuch). - - 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 script will print the filenames of a matching search: - - #!/usr/bin/env python - import sys - import notmuch - search = " ".join(sys.argv[1:]) - q = notmuch.Database().create_query(search) - for m in q.search_messages(): - print m.get_filename() - -* **Sync notmuch tags and maildir flags** - - 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: - - 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). - -* **Using notmuch with Mutt** - - 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 fairly straightforward. 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, together with some glue code. Check - out the - [howto](http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2011/01/how_to_use_Notmuch_with_Mutt/) - for more information. - - (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.) +[[!toc levels=2]] +## **Receive mail** + +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](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 + whenever you sync. Point _postsynchook_ to a script that gets run + on every sync and that will do the automatic updating and tagging + of your notmuch database. + +* [mbsync](http://isync.sourceforge.net/) + +* [getmail](http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/) + +* [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. + + +## **Send mail** + +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 + + +## **Sync notmuch tags and maildir flags** + +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: + + $ notmuch config set maildir.synchronize_flags false + +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. + +## **Use notmuch from python** + +See the [[Notmuch Library Language Bindings|bindings]] page. + +## **Using notmuch with Mutt** + +See [[notmuch-mutt]]. + +## **Automatically retagging the database (e.g., when upgrading versions)** + +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 --output=$HOME/out.nm + $ mv ~/Mail/.notmuch ~/.notmuch.bak + $ notmuch new + $ notmuch tag -inbox -unread '*' + $ notmuch restore --accumulate --input=$HOME/out.nm + +At this point, one should run a sanity check on the tags, and if everything +has merged correctly, the ~/.notmuch.bak directory is expendable, as is +$HOME/out.nm. + +## **Dealing with mbox and other formats** + +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. + +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. + +## **Take advantage of tags that are special to notmuch** + +See [[tags special to notmuch|special-tags]]. + + +## **Index all your gpg-encrypted email** + +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). + +## **Index and search emails written in CJK scripts** + +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]]