.\" notmuch - Not much of an email program, (just index, search and tagging) .\" .\" Copyright © 2009 Carl Worth .\" .\" Notmuch is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify .\" it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by .\" the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or .\" (at your option) any later version. .\" .\" Notmuch is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, .\" but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of .\" MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the .\" GNU General Public License for more details. .\" .\" You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License .\" along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ . .\" .\" Author: Carl Worth .TH NOTMUCH 1 2009-10-31 "Notmuch 0.1" .SH NAME notmuch \- thread-based email index, search, and tagging .SH SYNOPSIS .B notmuch .IR command " [" args " ...]" .SH DESCRIPTION Notmuch is a command-line based program for indexing, searching, reading, and tagging large collections of email messages. The quickest way to get started with Notmuch is to simply invoke the .B notmuch command with no arguments, which will interactively guide you through the process of indexing your mail. .SH NOTE While the command-line program .B notmuch provides powerful functionality, it does not provide the most convenient interface for that functionality. More sophisticated interfaces are expected to be built on top of either the command-line interface, or more likely, on top of the notmuch library interface. See http://notmuchmail.org for more about alternate interfaces to notmuch. .SH COMMANDS All commands need to know where your mail (and the notmuch database) are stored. This is ${HOME}/mail by default. An alternate location can be specified with the .B NOTMUCH_BASE environment variable. The .BR setup " and " new commands are used to add new mail messages to the notmuch database. .RS 4 .TP 4 .B setup Interactively sets up notmuch for first use. The setup command will prompt for the directory containing your email archives, and will then proceed to build a database that indexes the mail to allow for fast search of the archive. This directory can contain any number of sub-directories and should primarily contain only files with indvidual email messages (eg. maildir or mh archives are perfect). If there are other, non-email files (such as indexes maintained by other email programs) then notmuch will do its best to detect those and ignore them. Mail storage that uses mbox format, (where one mbox file contains many messages), will not work with notmuch. If that's how your mail is currently stored, it is recommended you first convert it to maildir format with a utility such as mb2md before running .BR "notmuch setup" . Invoking .B notmuch with no command argument will run .B setup if the setup command has not previously been completed. .TP .B new Find and import any new messages to the database. The .B new command scans all sub-directories of the database, adding new messages that are found. Each new message will automatically be tagged with both the .BR inbox and unread tags. Note: .B notmuch new will skip any read-only directories, so you can use that to mark directories that will not receive any new mail (and make .B notmuch new faster). .RE The .BR search " and "show commands are used to query the email database. .RS 4 .TP 4 .BR search " ..." Search for messages matching the given search terms, and display as results the threads containing the matched messages. The output consists of one line per thread, giving a thread ID, the date of the oldest matched message in the thread, and the subject from that message. Currently, in addition to free text (and quoted phrases) which match terms appearing anywhere within an email, the following prefixes can be used to search specific portions of an email, (where indicate user-supplied values): from: to: subject: tag: id: thread: The from: prefix is used to match the name or address of the sender of an email message. The to: prefix is used to match the names or addresses of any recipient of an email message, (whether To, Cc, or Bcc). Any term prefixed with subject: will match only text from the subject of an email. Quoted phrases are supported when searching with: subject:\"this is a phrase\". Valid tag values include .BR inbox " and " unread by default for new messages added by .B notmuch new as well as any other tag values added manually with .BR "notmuch tag" . Message ID values are the literal contents of the Message-ID: header of email messages, but without the '<', '>' delimiters. Thread ID values are generated internally by notmuch but can be seen in the first column of output from .B notmuch search for example. In addition to individual terms, multiple terms can be combined with Boolean operators ( .BR and ", " or ", " not , etc.). each term in the query will be implicitly connected by a logical AND if no explicit operator is provided, (except that terms with a common prefix will be implicitly combined with OR until we get Xapian defect #402 fixed). Parentheses can also be used to control the combination of the Boolean operators, but will have to be protected from interpretation by the shell, (such as by putting quotation marks around any parenthesized expression). .TP .BR show " ..." Shows all messages matching the search terms. See the documentation of .B search for details of the supported syntax of search terms. A common use of .B notmuch show is to display a single thread of email messages. For this, use a search term of "thread:" as can be seen in the first column of output from the .B notmuch search command. All messages will be displayed in date order. The output format is plain-text, with all text-content MIME parts decoded. Various components in the output, .RB ( message ", " header ", " body ", " attachment ", and MIME " part ), will be delimited by easily-parsed markers. Each marker consists of a Control-L character (ASCII decimal 12), the name of the marker, and then either an opening or closing brace, ('{' or '}'), to either open or close the component. .RE The .B tag command is the only command available for manipulating database contents. .RS 4 .TP 4 .BR tag " +|- [...] [--] ..." Add/remove tags for all messages matching the search terms. The search terms are handled exactly as in .B "notmuch search" so one can use that command first to see what will be modified. Tags prefixed by '+' are added while those prefixed by '-' are removed. For each message, tag removal is before tag addition. The beginning of is recognized by the first argument that begins with neither '+' nor '-'. Support for an initial search term beginning with '+' or '-' is provided by allowing the user to specify a "--" argument to separate the tags from the search terms. Caution: If you run .B "notmuch new" between reading a thread with .B "notmuch show" and removing the "inbox" tag for that thread with .B "notmuch tag" then you create the possibility of moving some messages from that thread out of your inbox without ever reading them. The easiest way to avoid this problem is to not run .B "notmuch new" between reading mail and removing tags. .RE The .BR dump " and " restore commands can be used to create a textual dump of email tags for backup purposes, and to restore from that dump .RS 4 .TP 4 .BR dump " []" Creates a plain-text dump of the tags of each message. The output is to the given filename, if any, or to stdout. These tags are the only data in the notmuch database that can't be recreated from the messages themselves. The output of notmuch dump is therefore the only critical thing to backup (and much more friendly to incremental backup than the native database files.) .TP .BR restore " " Restores the tags from the given file (see .BR "notmuch dump" "." Note: The dump file format is specifically chosen to be compatible with the format of files produced by sup-dump. So if you've previously been using sup for mail, then the .B "notmuch restore" command provides you a way to import all of your tags (or labels as sup calls them). .SH ENVIRONMENT .B NOTMUCH_BASE Set to the directory which contains the user's mail to be indexed and searched by notmuch. Notmuch will create a directory named .B .notmuch at the toplevel of this directory where it will store its database. .SH SEE ALSO The emacs-based interface to notmuch (available as .B notmuch.el in the Notmuch distribution). The notmuch website: .B http://notmuchmail.org