Notmuch - thread-based email index, search and tagging.
Notmuch is a system for indexing, searching, reading, and tagging
-large collections of email messages. It uses the Xapian library to
-provide fast, full-text search of very large collection of email with
-a very convenient search syntas.
+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).
----------------
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
-We will soon be creating a mailing list for users and developers of
-notmuch. Details will appear on the website. Until then, please feel
-free to email Carl with any questions you have:
+The mailing list address for the notmuch community is:
+
+ notmuch@notmuchmail.org
- Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.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
-
-Interface options
------------------
-Notmuch includes a "notmuch" command-line interface to the system.
-This is not a very convenient interface and it is not expected that
-users will find it satisfying. Instead, there are two option for
-obtaining a more sophisticated interface:
-
- 1. Build on top of the "notmuch" command-line interface.
-
- This might be a reasonable option for a very text-oriented
- client environment. For example, an emacs-based interface for
- notmuch is already under development and is available in the
- notmuch.el file in this distribution.
-
- If someone were to write a curses-based interface, or similar,
- it might also be reasonable to buil on the "notmuch"
- command-line interface.
-
- 2. Build on top of the notmuch library interface.
-
- This is a better choice for developing an interface that has
- full control of the presentation of email threads and
- messages. It is expected that anyone integrating Notmuch into
- an existing, graphical email program use the notmuch library
- interface.
-
- The public interface to the notmuch library is contained in
- the notmuch.h header file. The "notmuch" command-line program
- in notmuch.c can be used as good example code, since it is a
- simple program that is written on top of the library
- interface.
-
-As can be seen, alternate interfaces to the Notmuch mail system are
-still in development. We would appreciate any contributions to these
-efforts.
-
-
-
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