Thread-based email index, search, and tagging
notmuch [option ...] command [arg ...]
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.
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.
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}.
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.
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.
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.
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 <[email protected]> . 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).
Carl Worth and many others
2014, Carl Worth and many others