NAME¶
notmuch - thread-based email index, search, and tagging
SYNOPSIS¶
notmuch [option ...]
command [arg ...]
DESCRIPTION¶
Notmuch is a command-line based program for indexing, searching, reading, and
tagging large collections of email messages.
This page describes how to get started using notmuch from the command line, and
gives a brief overview of the commands available. For more information on e.g.
notmuch show consult the
notmuch-show(1) man page, also
accessible via
notmuch help show
The quickest way to get started with Notmuch is to simply invoke the
notmuch command with no arguments, which will interactively guide you
through the process of indexing your mail.
NOTE¶
While the command-line program
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. The emacs-based interface to notmuch (available under
emacs/ in the Notmuch source distribution) is probably the most widely
used at this time.
OPTIONS¶
Supported global options for
notmuch include
- --help
- Print a synopsis of available commands and exit.
- --version
- Print the installed version of notmuch, and exit.
- --config=FILE
- Specify the configuration file to use. This overrides any configuration
file specified by ${NOTMUCH_CONFIG}.
COMMANDS¶
SETUP¶
The
notmuch setup command is used to configure Notmuch for first use, (or
to reconfigure it later).
The setup command will prompt for your full name, your primary email address,
any alternate email addresses you use, and the directory containing your email
archives. Your answers will be written to a configuration file in
${NOTMUCH_CONFIG} (if set) or ${HOME}/.notmuch-config . This configuration
file will be created with descriptive comments, making it easy to edit by hand
later to change the configuration. Or you can run
notmuch setup again
to change the configuration.
The mail directory you specify can contain any number of sub-directories and
should primarily contain only files with individual 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
notmuch setup .
Invoking
notmuch with no command argument will run
setup if the
setup command has not previously been completed.
OTHER COMMANDS¶
Several of the notmuch commands accept search terms with a common syntax. See
notmuch-search-terms(7) for more details on the supported syntax.
The
search,
show and
count commands are used to query the
email database.
The
reply command is useful for preparing a template for an email reply.
The
tag command is the only command available for manipulating database
contents.
The
dump and
restore commands can be used to create a textual dump
of email tags for backup purposes, and to restore from that dump.
The
config command can be used to get or set settings in the notmuch
configuration file.
ENVIRONMENT¶
The following environment variables can be used to control the behavior of
notmuch.
- NOTMUCH_CONFIG
- Specifies the location of the notmuch configuration file. Notmuch will use
${HOME}/.notmuch-config if this variable is not set.
- NOTMUCH_TALLOC_REPORT
- Location to write a talloc memory usage report. See
talloc_enable_leak_report_full in talloc(3) for more
information.
- NOTMUCH_DEBUG_QUERY
- If set to a non-empty value, the notmuch library will print (to stderr)
Xapian queries it constructs.
SEE ALSO¶
notmuch-config(1),
notmuch-count(1),
notmuch-dump(1),
notmuch-hooks(5),
notmuch-insert(1),
notmuch-new(1),
notmuch-reply(1),
notmuch-restore(1),
notmuch-search(1),
notmuch-search-terms(7),
notmuch-show(1),
notmuch-tag(1)
The notmuch website:
http://notmuchmail.org
Feel free to send questions, comments, or kudos to the notmuch mailing list <
notmuch@notmuchmail.org> . Subscription is not required before
posting, but is available from the notmuchmail.org website.
Real-time interaction with the Notmuch community is available via IRC (server:
irc.freenode.net, channel: #notmuch).
AUTHOR¶
Carl Worth and many others
COPYRIGHT¶
2014, Carl Worth and many others