NAME
notmuch - thread-based email index, search, and tagging
SYNOPSIS
notmuch command [args ...]
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
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.
COMMANDS
The setup command is used to configure Notmuch for first use, (or to
reconfigure it later).
setup
Interactively sets up notmuch for first use.
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.
The new command is used to incorporate new mail into the notmuch
database.
new Find and import any new messages to the database.
The new command scans all sub-directories of the database,
performing full-text indexing on new messages that are found.
Each new message will automatically be tagged with both the
inbox and unread tags.
You should run notmuch new once after first running notmuch
setup to create the initial database. The first run may take a
long time if you have a significant amount of mail (several
hundred thousand messages or more). Subsequently, you should
run notmuch new whenever new mail is delivered and you wish to
incorporate it into the database. These subsequent runs will be
much quicker than the initial run.
Invoking notmuch with no command argument will run new if
notmuch setup has previously been completed, but notmuch new
has not previously been run.
Several of the notmuch commands accept search terms with a common
syntax. See the SEARCH SYNTAX section below for more details on the
supported syntax.
The search, show and count commands are used to query the email
database.
search [options...] <search-term>...
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 newest (or oldest, depending on the sort
option) matched message in the thread, the number of matched
messages and total messages in the thread, the names of all
participants in the thread, and the subject of the newest (or
oldest) message.
Supported options for search include
--format=(json|text)
Presents the results in either JSON or plain-text
(default).
--sort=(newest-first|oldest-first)
This option can be used to present results in either
chronological order (oldest-first) or reverse chronological
order (newest-first).
Note: The thread order will be distinct between these two
options (beyond being simply reversed). When sorting by
oldest-first the threads will be sorted by the oldest
message in each thread, but when sorting by newest-first
the threads will be sorted by the newest message in each
thread.
By default, results will be displayed in reverse chronological
order, (that is, the newest results will be displayed first).
See the SEARCH SYNTAX section below for details of the
supported syntax for <search-terms>.
show [options...] <search-term>...
Shows all messages matching the search terms.
The messages will be grouped and sorted based on the threading
(all replies to a particular message will appear immediately
after that message in date order). The output is not indented
by default, but depth tags are printed so that proper
indentation can be performed by a post-processor (such as the
emacs interface to notmuch).
Supported options for show include
--entire-thread
By default only those messages that match the search terms
will be displayed. With this option, all messages in the
same thread as any matched message will be displayed.
--format=(json|text)
text
The default plain-text format has text-content MIME
parts decoded. Various components in the output,
(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.
json
Format output as Javascript Object Notation (JSON).
JSON output always includes all messages in a matching
thread; in effect --format=json implies --entire-thread
A common use of notmuch show is to display a single thread of
email messages. For this, use a search term of "thread:<thread-
id>" as can be seen in the first column of output from the
notmuch search command.
See the SEARCH SYNTAX section below for details of the
supported syntax for <search-terms>.
count <search-term>...
Count messages matching the search terms.
The number of matching messages is output to stdout.
With no search terms, a count of all messages in the database
will be displayed.
The reply command is useful for preparing a template for an email
reply.
reply [options...] <search-term>...
Constructs a reply template for a set of messages.
To make replying to email easier, notmuch reply takes an
existing set of messages and constructs a suitable mail
template. The Reply-to header (if any, otherwise From:) is used
for the To: address. Vales from the To: and Cc: headers are
copied, but not including any of the current user’s email
addresses (as configured in primary_mail or other_email in the
.notmuch-config file) in the recipient list
It also builds a suitable new subject, including Re: at the
front (if not already present), and adding the message IDs of
the messages being replied to to the References list and
setting the In-Reply-To: field correctly.
Finally, the original contents of the emails are quoted by
prefixing each line with ’> ’ and included in the body.
The resulting message template is output to stdout.
Supported options for reply include
--format=(default|headers-only)
default
Includes subject and quoted message body.
headers-only
Only produces In-Reply-To, References, To, Cc, and Bcc
headers.
See the SEARCH SYNTAX section below for details of the
supported syntax for <search-terms>.
Note: It is most common to use notmuch reply with a search
string matching a single message, (such as id:<message-id>),
but it can be useful to reply to several messages at once. For
example, when a series of patches are sent in a single thread,
replying to the entire thread allows for the reply to comment
on issue found in multiple patches.
The tag command is the only command available for manipulating database
contents.
tag +<tag>|-<tag> [...] [--] <search-term>...
Add/remove tags for all messages matching the search terms.
Tags prefixed by ’+’ are added while those prefixed by ’-’ are
removed. For each message, tag removal is performed before tag
addition.
The beginning of <search-terms> 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.
See the SEARCH SYNTAX section below for details of the
supported syntax for <search-terms>.
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
dump [<filename>]
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.)
restore <filename>
Restores the tags from the given file (see 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 notmuch
restore command provides you a way to import all of your tags
(or labels as sup calls them).
The part command can used to output a single part of a multi-part MIME
message.
part --part=<part-number> <search-term>...
Output a single MIME part of a message.
A single decoded MIME part, with no encoding or framing, is
output to stdout. The search terms must match only a single
message, otherwise this command will fail.
The part number should match the part "id" field output by the
"--format=json" option of "notmuch show". If the message
specified by the search terms does not include a part with the
specified "id" there will be no output.
See the SEARCH SYNTAX section below for details of the
supported syntax for <search-terms>.
SEARCH SYNTAX
Several notmuch commands accept a common syntax for search terms.
The search terms can consist of free-form text (and quoted phrases)
which will match all messages that contain all of the given
terms/phrases in the body, the subject, or any of the sender or
recipient headers.
As a special case, a search string consisting of exactly a single
asterisk ("*") will match all messages.
In addition to free text, the following prefixes can be used to force
terms to match against specific portions of an email, (where <brackets>
indicate user-supplied values):
from:<name-or-address>
to:<name-or-address>
subject:<word-or-quoted-phrase>
attachment:<word>
tag:<tag> (or is:<tag>)
id:<message-id>
thread:<thread-id>
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. Searching for a phrase in the subject is supported by
including quotation marks around the phrase, immediately following
subject:.
The attachment: prefix can be used to search for specific filenames (or
extensions) of attachments to email messages.
For tag: and is: valid tag values include inbox and unread by default
for new messages added by notmuch new as well as any other tag values
added manually with notmuch tag.
For id:, message ID values are the literal contents of the Message-ID:
header of email messages, but without the ’<’, ’>’ delimiters.
The thread: prefix can be used with the thread ID values that are
generated internally by notmuch (and do not appear in email messages).
These thread ID values can be seen in the first column of output from
notmuch search
In addition to individual terms, multiple terms can be combined with
Boolean operators ( 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).
Finally, results can be restricted to only messages within a particular
time range, (based on the Date: header) with a syntax of:
<intial-timestamp>..<final-timestamp>
Each timestamp is a number representing the number of seconds since
1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC. This is not the most convenient means of
expressing date ranges, but until notmuch is fixed to accept a more
convenient form, one can use the date program to construct timestamps.
For example, with the bash shell the folowing syntax would specify a
date range to return messages from 2009-10-01 until the current time:
$(date +%s -d 2009-10-01)..$(date +%s)
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.
SEE ALSO
The emacs-based interface to notmuch (available as notmuch.el in the
Notmuch distribution).
The notmuch website: http://notmuchmail.org
CONTACT
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).