+* 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 GPL version 3. 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.
+
+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/">mailing-list archives
+</a>.