[[!img notmuch-logo.png alt="Notmuch logo" class="left"]]
#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 initial tagging of messages.
* **Use notmuch from python**
Notmuch includes python bindings to the notmuch shared
library. Extensive API documentation [is
available](http://notmuchmail.readthedocs.org/).
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 snippet will produce a list of mails matching the given
expression:
>>> import notmuch
>>> db = notmuch.Database()
>>> query = db.create_query('tag:inbox AND NOT tag:killed')
>>> list(query.search_messages()) # doctest:+ELLIPSIS
[...]
* **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.)
* **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 ~/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.
* **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.