Mutt mail indexing on steroids!

Notmuch seems interesting project. I my self tried different indexers couple of years a go, but finally found that best for my mail work flow was to just view all emails at once in Mutt. I did couple of neat limit key bindings and added colors to different mailing list messages and now my Mutt mail view has all messages quickly accessible.

Mutt is really fast with cache options enabled. For example my mutt status bar states: [Msgs:47453 New:53 531M] and the mailbox loads in 1 or 2 seconds.

It requires notmuch 0.5 because of the output file option. Otherwise, a sincere thank you for sharing this tip. I feel like I have my life back.

Thanks for this very nice recipe.

Took me a bit of twiddeling to find out that the "libmail-box-perl" package is needed and to use the newer version of "notmuch" from unstable.

Now it just works *g*

Kudos

In the browser screen, change-folder-readonly doesn't work. You can use the following snippet instead:

    macro browser <F8> "<enter-command>unset wait_key<enter><shell-escape>mutt-notmuch --prompt search\
      <enter><change-dir>../.cache/<enter><search>mutt_results<enter><enter>" "search mail (using notmuch)"

Cheers

Hi Zack,

I think your script needs to live somewhere!

I thought perhaps "moreutils", but it might not fit there; there is also the "bikeshed" package in Ubuntu (hmm, not in Debian yet though, something to put on my maybe-ITP list)

If you use mutt-patched the F9 macro works, but if you use regular mutt and you have ignore message-id in your conf file, then you need to modify your lines as follows

    macro index <F9> "<enter-command>unset wait_key<enter><enter-command>unignore message-id\
      <enter><pipe-message>mutt-notmuch thread<enter><change-folder-readonly>~/.cache/mutt_results\
      <enter><enter-command>set wait_key<enter>" "search and reconstruct owning thread (using notmuch)"

othwise the script is fed with an incomplete header and cannot rebuild the thread.

Cheers

I guess the right package would be notmuch, since moreutils is more general purpose.

A completely new package for just one 100 lines scripts seems a bit overkilling, but is doable too.

Does anybody know how I could make mark email in that 'virtual mailbox as deleted or read?

I've tried replacing change-folder-readonly to change-folder, but that didn't help. That feature would make this setup perfect!

The associated perl script was very helpful, now I'm cruising along with notmuch + mutt + offlineimap. For you Fedora (14+) users out there, the following perl dependencies were needed for notmuch-mutt: "perl-Email-Sender perl-MailTools"

These will pull in the following perl packages and spamassasin: http://pastebin.com/nkfB5bRQ

Hi,

This is a great page! Integrating mutt with notmuch (and offlineimap) is fantastic. After doing this, one thing that I found I wanted was a way to tag and untag emails based on a selection made in mutt, i.e. tagging (in the notmuch sense) emails that have been tagged (in the mutt sense).

I can't write anything in perl so I can't contribute directly to your work, but was able to hack a small shell script together that does what I need. It is not pretty, but I thought I'd share it here. It looks like getting user input into mutt is not so easy, but using vi in this way seems to work.

# mutt-notmuch-tag.sh
# Simple and crude script to tag multiple messagess in mutt using notmuch.
grep "Message-ID" - > temp.txt
sed -e 's|Message-ID:.*<\(.*\)>.*|id:\1|' temp.txt > temp1.txt
sed '{:q;N;s/\n/ OR /g;t q}' temp1.txt > temp2.txt

## When vi opens up list the tagging commands, e.g. +tag1 -tag2
vi tags.txt

TAGS=`cat tags.txt`
SEARCHEXPR=`cat temp2.txt`

## For debugging
echo "notmuch tag $TAGS -- $SEARCHEXPR" >> temp2.txt

## Now apply the tags
notmuch tag $TAGS -- $SEARCHEXPR

# End of mutt-notmuch-tag.sh

Then in my .muttrc I have:

macro index <F7> "<tag-prefix><pipe-message>~/bin/mutt-notmuch-tag.sh<enter>" "Tag messages (using notmuch)"

On BSD systems the script fails because of gnu xargs and ln options. I changed the code to be pure perl.

--- mutt-notmuch.orig   2011-06-07 18:35:15.000000000 -0500
+++ mutt-notmuch    2011-06-07 18:40:51.000000000 -0500
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-#!/usr/bin/perl -w
+#!/usr/bin/env perl -w
 #
 # mutt-notmuch - notmuch (of a) helper for Mutt
 #
@@ -12,6 +12,7 @@
 use warnings;

 use File::Path;
+use File::Basename;
 use Getopt::Long;
 use Mail::Internet;
 use Mail::Box::Maildir;
@@ -33,8 +34,12 @@
     my ($maildir, $query) = @_;

     empty_maildir($maildir);
-    system("notmuch search --output=files $query"
-      . " | xargs --no-run-if-empty ln -s -t $maildir/cur/");
+    my @filelist = `notmuch search --output=files $query`;
+    foreach(@filelist) {
+      chomp;
+      my $target = sprintf("$maildir/cur/%s", basename($_));
+      symlink($_, $target);
+    }
 }

 sub search_action($$@) {

I think your script needs to live somewhere!

You're right!

I've now proposed it for inclusion into upstream notmuch. Upstream author seems positive about it and is preparing a contrib/ directory to include it and similar tools. As soon as that happens, I'll move maintenance of the script there.

The wishlist bug report where the discussion happened is Debian bug 628018. If all goes at planned, it will soon land in Debian as a new binary package "notmuch-mutt".

Cheers.

On BSD systems the script fails because of gnu xargs and ln options. I changed the code to be pure perl.

Thanks a lot. Do you mind providing a patch against the current git repo?

I'll be happy to apply it if you do so, but note that at the moment it doesn't apply cleanly (as I've added in the meantime support for mailboxes containing spaces, which requires an extra sed pipe in between).

Many thanks in advance, Cheers.

apart from 'qmutt' ?

sure, but it has nothing which is mutt-notmuch-specific.

Search results are shown in a regular mailbox, so "go back" actually just means changing to another mailbox (which might happen to be the one you were before searching or not).

I'm using mutt-patched, so I move across mailboxes through the sidebar. In regular mutt you usually do that via the "c" keybinding.

Hope this helps.