1 [[!img notmuch-logo.png alt="Notmuch logo" class="left"]]
4 Some tips about how to do some useful things with notmuch, and the
5 various "third party" notmuch utilities.
7 * <span id="receive_mail">**Receive mail**</span>
9 Notmuch requires either [maildir
10 flag](http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html) or a "mh"-style
11 maildirectory to operate on. Basically any setup in which each mail
12 is in a file of it's own will work. Here are some generally
13 well-regarded mail retrieval tools:
15 * [offlineimap](https://github.com/jgoerzen/offlineimap/wiki/) -
16 quite useful and widely tested, it also offers a handy hook that
17 will come in useful a bit later in our setup. Also supports
18 "presynchook" and "postsynchook" command that will get run
19 whenever you sync. Point _postsynchook_ to a script that gets run
20 on every sync and that will do the automatic updating and tagging
21 of your notmuch database.
23 * [mbsync](http://isync.sourceforge.net/)
25 * [getmail](http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/)
27 * [fetchmail](http://fetchmail.berlios.de/)
29 See the [initial tagging page](/initial_tagging) for more info on intial tagging of messages.
31 * <span id="print_filenames">**Print only filenames of a search (python bindings)**</span>
33 Notmuch includes python bindings to the notmuch shared library,
34 called [cnotmuch](http://pypi.python.org/pypi/cnotmuch). Extensive
35 API documentation available.
37 The bindings are very simple to use. As an example, given you have
38 the python bindings installed (or simply set your PYTHONPATH
39 environment variable to point to the .../bindings/python directory),
40 this script will print the filenames of a matching search:
45 search = " ".join(sys.argv[1:])
46 q = notmuch.Database().create_query(search)
47 for m in q.search_messages():
48 print m.get_filename()
50 * <span id="sync_maildir_flags">**Sync notmuch tags and maildir flags**</span>
52 notmuch **since version 0.5** syncs maildir flags and respective
53 tags in both directions. This how to applies only to notmuch
56 Some IMAP users rely on maildir flags that convey the status "seen",
57 "replied", "trashed", in order to synchronize the status of their
58 mail across mail clients (a [maildir
59 flag](http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html) is simply a defined part
60 of their filename). Notmuch will by default happily ignore those
61 flags and will never modify them either, as there is no built-in
62 support for sunchronizing your notmuch tags with your imap maildir
63 flags (seen, replied, trashed, etc). However there are currently 2
64 ways in which you can achieve synchronization.
66 [notmuchsync](http://spaetz.github.com/notmuchsync/) is a utility
67 (based on the cnotmuch python bindings) that allows synchronization
68 in either direction, as well as pruning of deleted files.
70 The second solution allows for fast maildir flag to notmuch tag
71 synchronization (and only in that direction) requires patching the
72 notmuch source code. The patch has been posted in this mail
73 *id:1267450136-31749-1-git-send-email-Sebastian@SSpaeth.de* and can
74 be viewed as a [source diff in this git
75 repository](http://github.com/spaetz/notmuch-all-feature/commit/df3b087cefb85e9d16fd17540e348bcb854dd7ee).