Notmuch - thread-based email index, search and tagging. Notmuch is a system for indexing, searching, reading, and tagging large collections of email messages in maildir or mh format. It uses the Xapian library to provide fast, full-text search with a convenient search syntax. Notmuch is free software, released under the GNU General Public License version 3 (or later). Building notmuch ---------------- See the INSTALL file for notes on compiling and installing notmuch. Running notmuch --------------- After installing notmuch, start by running "notmuch setup" which will interactively prompt for configuration information such as your name, email address, and the directory which contains your mail archive to be indexed. You can change any answers later by running "notmuch setup" again or by editing the .notmuch-config file in your home directory. With notmuch configured you should next run "notmuch new" which will index all of your existing mail. This can take a long time, (several hours) if you have a lot of email, (hundreds of thousands of files). When new mail is delivered to your mail archive in the future, you will want to run "notmuch new" again. These runs will be much faster as they will only index new messages. Finally, you can prove to yourself that things are working by running some command-line searches such as "notmuch search from:someone@example.com" or "notmuch search subject:topic". See "notmuch help search-terms" for more details on the available search syntax. The command-line search output is not expected to be particularly friendly for day-to-day usage. Instead, it is expected that you will use an email interface that builds on the notmuch command-line tool or the libnotmuch library. Notmuch installs a full-featured email interface for use within emacs. To use this, first add the following line to your .emacs file: (require 'notmuch) Then, either run "emacs -f notmuch" or execute the command "M-x notmuch" from within a running emacs. If you're interested in a non-emacs-based interface to notmuch, then please join the notmuch community. Various other interfaces are already in progress, (an interface within vim, a curses interface, graphical interfaces based on evolution, and various web-based interfaces). The authors of these interfaces would love further testing or contribution. See contact information below. Contacting users and developers ------------------------------- The website for Notmuch is: http://notmuchmail.org The mailing list address for the notmuch community is: notmuch@notmuchmail.org We welcome any sort of questions, comments, kudos, or code there. Subscription is not required, (but if you do subscribe you'll avoid any delay due to moderation). See the website for subscription information. There is also an IRC channel dedicated to talk about using and developing notmuch: IRC server: irc.freenode.net Channel: #notmuch