git.notmuchmail.org Git - notmuch/blob

1 .\" notmuch - Not much of an email program, (just index, search and tagging)

2 .\"

4 .\"

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.

9 .\"

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.

14 .\"

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/ .

17 .\"

18 .\" Author: Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org>

19 .TH NOTMUCH 1 2012-06-01 "Notmuch 0.13.2"

20 .SH NAME

21 notmuch \- thread-based email index, search, and tagging

22 .SH SYNOPSIS

23 .B notmuch

24 .IR command " [" args " ...]"

25 .SH DESCRIPTION

26 Notmuch is a command-line based program for indexing, searching,

27 reading, and tagging large collections of email messages.

29 This page describes how to get started using notmuch from the command

30 line, and gives a brief overview of the commands available. For more

31 information on e.g.

32 .B notmuch show

33 consult the \fBnotmuch-show\fR(1) man page, also accessible via

34 .B notmuch help show

36 The quickest way to get started with Notmuch is to simply invoke the

37 .B notmuch

38 command with no arguments, which will interactively guide you through

39 the process of indexing your mail.

40 .SH NOTE

41 While the command-line program

42 .B notmuch

43 provides powerful functionality, it does not provide the most

44 convenient interface for that functionality. More sophisticated

45 interfaces are expected to be built on top of either the command-line

46 interface, or more likely, on top of the notmuch library

47 interface. See http://notmuchmail.org for more about alternate

48 interfaces to notmuch. The emacs-based interface to notmuch (available under

49 .B emacs/

50 in the Notmuch source distribution) is probably the most widely used at

51 this time.

53 .SH COMMANDS

56 .SS SETUP

58 The

59 .B notmuch setup

60 command is used to configure Notmuch for first use, (or to reconfigure

61 it later).

63 The setup command will prompt for your full name, your primary email

64 address, any alternate email addresses you use, and the directory

65 containing your email archives. Your answers will be written to a

66 configuration file in ${NOTMUCH_CONFIG} (if set) or

67 ${HOME}/.notmuch-config . This configuration file will be created with

68 descriptive comments, making it easy to edit by hand later to change the

69 configuration. Or you can run

70 .B "notmuch setup"

71 again to change the configuration.

73 The mail directory you specify can contain any number of

74 sub-directories and should primarily contain only files with individual

75 email messages (eg. maildir or mh archives are perfect). If there are

76 other, non-email files (such as indexes maintained by other email

77 programs) then notmuch will do its best to detect those and ignore

78 them.

80 Mail storage that uses mbox format, (where one mbox file contains many

81 messages), will not work with notmuch. If that's how your mail is

82 currently stored, it is recommended you first convert it to maildir

83 format with a utility such as mb2md before running

84 .B "notmuch setup" .

86 Invoking

87 .B notmuch

88 with no command argument will run

89 .B setup

90 if the setup command has not previously been completed.

91 .RE

93 .SS OTHER COMMANDS

95 Several of the notmuch commands accept search terms with a common

96 syntax. See \fNnotmuch-search-terms\fR(7)

97 for more details on the supported syntax.

99 The

100 .BR search ", " show " and " count

101 commands are used to query the email database.

102

103 The

104 .B reply

105 command is useful for preparing a template for an email reply.

106

107 The

108 .B tag

109 command is the only command available for manipulating database

110 contents.

111

112

113 The

114 .BR dump " and " restore

115 commands can be used to create a textual dump of email tags for backup

116 purposes, and to restore from that dump.

117

118 The

119 .B config

120 command can be used to get or set settings int the notmuch

121 configuration file.

122

123 .SH ENVIRONMENT

124 The following environment variables can be used to control the

125 behavior of notmuch.

126 .TP

127 .B NOTMUCH_CONFIG

128 Specifies the location of the notmuch configuration file. Notmuch will

129 use ${HOME}/.notmuch\-config if this variable is not set.

130 .SH SEE ALSO

131

132 \fBnotmuch-config\fR(1), \fBnotmuch-count\fR(1),

133 \fBnotmuch-dump\fR(1), \fBnotmuch-hooks\fR(5), \fBnotmuch-new\fR(1),

134 \fBnotmuch-reply\fR(1), \fBnotmuch-restore\fR(1),

135 \fBnotmuch-search\fR(1), \fBnotmuch-search-terms\fR(7),

136 \fBnotmuch-show\fR(1), \fBnotmuch-tag\fR(1)

137

138

139 The notmuch website:

140 .B http://notmuchmail.org

141 .SH CONTACT

142 Feel free to send questions, comments, or kudos to the notmuch mailing

143 list <notmuch@notmuchmail.org> . Subscription is not required before

144 posting, but is available from the notmuchmail.org website.

145

146 Real-time interaction with the Notmuch community is available via IRC

147 (server: irc.freenode.net, channel: #notmuch).