1 .\" notmuch - Not much of an email program, (just index, search and tagging)
3 .\" Copyright © 2009 Carl Worth
5 .\" Notmuch is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
6 .\" it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
7 .\" the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
8 .\" (at your option) any later version.
10 .\" Notmuch is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
11 .\" but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
12 .\" MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
13 .\" GNU General Public License for more details.
15 .\" You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
16 .\" along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ .
18 .\" Author: Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org>
19 .TH NOTMUCH 1 2011-12-04 "Notmuch 0.10.2"
21 notmuch \- thread-based email index, search, and tagging
24 .IR command " [" args " ...]"
26 Notmuch is a command-line based program for indexing, searching,
27 reading, and tagging large collections of email messages.
29 The quickest way to get started with Notmuch is to simply invoke the
31 command with no arguments, which will interactively guide you through
32 the process of indexing your mail.
34 While the command-line program
36 provides powerful functionality, it does not provide the most
37 convenient interface for that functionality. More sophisticated
38 interfaces are expected to be built on top of either the command-line
39 interface, or more likely, on top of the notmuch library
40 interface. See http://notmuchmail.org for more about alternate
41 interfaces to notmuch.
45 command is used to configure Notmuch for first use, (or to reconfigure
51 Interactively sets up notmuch for first use.
53 The setup command will prompt for your full name, your primary email
54 address, any alternate email addresses you use, and the directory
55 containing your email archives. Your answers will be written to a
56 configuration file in ${NOTMUCH_CONFIG} (if set) or
57 ${HOME}/.notmuch-config . This configuration file will be created with
58 descriptive comments, making it easy to edit by hand later to change the
59 configuration. Or you can run
61 again to change the configuration.
63 The mail directory you specify can contain any number of
64 sub-directories and should primarily contain only files with individual
65 email messages (eg. maildir or mh archives are perfect). If there are
66 other, non-email files (such as indexes maintained by other email
67 programs) then notmuch will do its best to detect those and ignore
70 Mail storage that uses mbox format, (where one mbox file contains many
71 messages), will not work with notmuch. If that's how your mail is
72 currently stored, it is recommended you first convert it to maildir
73 format with a utility such as mb2md before running
78 with no command argument will run
80 if the setup command has not previously been completed.
85 Several of the notmuch commands accept search terms with a common
88 section below for more details on the supported syntax.
91 .BR search ", " show " and " count
92 commands are used to query the email database.
97 command is useful for preparing a template for an email reply.
102 command is the only command available for manipulating database
107 .BR dump " and " restore
108 commands can be used to create a textual dump of email tags for backup
109 purposes, and to restore from that dump.
113 command can be used to get or set settings int the notmuch
117 The following environment variables can be used to control the
121 Specifies the location of the notmuch configuration file. Notmuch will
122 use ${HOME}/.notmuch\-config if this variable is not set.
124 The emacs-based interface to notmuch (available as
126 in the Notmuch distribution).
129 .B http://notmuchmail.org
131 Feel free to send questions, comments, or kudos to the notmuch mailing
132 list <notmuch@notmuchmail.org> . Subscription is not required before
133 posting, but is available from the notmuchmail.org website.
135 Real-time interaction with the Notmuch community is available via IRC
136 (server: irc.freenode.net, channel: #notmuch).