path: root/notmuch.1

.\" notmuch - Not much of an email program, (just index, search and tagging)
.\"
.\" Copyright © 2009 Carl Worth
.\"
.\" Notmuch is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
.\" it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
.\" the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
.\" (at your option) any later version.
.\"
.\" Notmuch is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
.\" but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
.\" MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
.\" GNU General Public License for more details.
.\"
.\" You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
.\" along with this program.  If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ .
.\"
.\" Author: Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org>
.TH NOTMUCH 1 2009-10-31 "Notmuch 0.1"
.SH NAME
notmuch \- thread-based email index, search, and tagging
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B notmuch
.IR command " [" args " ...]"
.SH 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
.B notmuch
command with no arguments, which will interactively guide you through
the process of indexing your mail.
.SH NOTE
While the command-line program
.B 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.
.SH COMMANDS
All commands need to know where your mail (and the notmuch database)
are stored. This is ${HOME}/mail by default. An alternate location can
be specified with the
.B NOTMUCH_BASE
environment variable.

The
.BR setup " and " new
commands are used to add new mail messages to the notmuch database.
.RS 4
.TP 4
.B setup

Interactively sets up notmuch for first use.

The setup command will prompt for the directory containing your email
archives, and will then proceed to build a database that indexes the
mail to allow for fast search of the archive.

This directory can contain any number of sub-directories and should
primarily contain only files with indvidual 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
.BR "notmuch setup" .

Invoking
.B notmuch
with no command argument will run
.B setup
if the setup command has not previously been completed.

.TP
.B new

Find and import any new messages to the database.

The
.B new
command scans all sub-directories of the database, adding new messages
that are found. Each new message will automatically be tagged with
both the
.BR inbox and unread
tags.

Note:
.B notmuch new
will skip any read-only directories, so you can use that to mark
directories that will not receive any new mail (and make
.B notmuch new
faster).
.RE

The
.BR search " and "show
commands are used to query the email database.
.RS 4
.TP 4
.BR search " <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 oldest matched message in the thread, and the subject from
that message.

Currently, in addition to free text (and quoted phrases) which match
terms appearing anywhere within an email, the following prefixes can
be used to search specific portions of an email, (where <brackets>
indicate user-supplied values):

	from:<name-or-address>

	to:<name-or-address>

	subject:<word-or-quoted-phrase>

	tag:<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. Quoted phrases are supported when
searching with: subject:\"this is a phrase\".

Valid tag values include
.BR inbox " and " unread
by default for new messages added by
.B notmuch new
as well as any other tag values added manually with
.BR "notmuch tag" .

Message ID values are the literal contents of the Message-ID: header
of email messages, but without the '<', '>' delimiters.

Thread ID values are generated internally by notmuch but can be seen
in the first column of output from
.B notmuch search
for example.

In addition to individual terms, multiple terms can be
combined with Boolean operators (
.BR 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).
.TP
.BR reply " <search-term>..."

Constructs a reply template for a set of messages.

See the documentation of
.B search
for deatils of the supported syntax of search terms.

To make replying to email easier,
.B notmuch reply
takes an existing set of messages and constructs a suitable mail
template, taking From: and To: messages and using those for the new
To: address; copying Cc: addresses, building a suitable new subject
including Re: at the front, adding the old message IDs to the
References list and setting the In-Reply-To: field correctly.

The resulting message template is output to stdout.

.TP
.BR show " <search-term>..."

Shows all messages matching the search terms.

See the documentation of
.B search
for details of the supported syntax of search terms.

A common use of
.B 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
.B notmuch search
command.

All messages will be displayed in date order. The output format is
plain-text, with all text-content MIME parts decoded. Various
components in the output,
.RB ( 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.
.RE

The
.B tag
command is the only command available for manipulating database
contents.

.RS 4
.TP 4
.BR tag " +<tag>|-<tag> [...] [--] <search-term>..."

Add/remove tags for all messages matching the search terms.

The search terms are handled exactly as in
.B "notmuch search"
so one can use that command first to see what will be modified.

Tags prefixed by '+' are added while those prefixed by '-' are
removed. For each message, tag removal is 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.

Caution: If you run
.B "notmuch new"
between reading a thread with
.B "notmuch show"
and removing the "inbox" tag for that thread with
.B "notmuch tag"
then you create the possibility of moving some messages from that
thread out of your inbox without ever reading them. The easiest way to
avoid this problem is to not run
.B "notmuch new"
between reading mail and removing tags.
.RE

The
.BR dump " and " restore
commands can be used to create a textual dump of email tags for backup
purposes, and to restore from that dump

.RS 4
.TP 4
.BR 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.)
.TP
.BR restore " <filename>"

Restores the tags from the given file (see
.BR "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
.B "notmuch restore"
command provides you a way to import all of your tags (or labels as
sup calls them).
.SH ENVIRONMENT
.B NOTMUCH_BASE
Set to the directory which contains the user's mail to be indexed and
searched by notmuch. Notmuch will create a directory named
.B .notmuch
at the toplevel of this directory where it will store its database.
.SH SEE ALSO
The emacs-based interface to notmuch (available as
.B notmuch.el
in the Notmuch distribution).

The notmuch website:
.B http://notmuchmail.org