Notmuch – Just an email system

Last I looked there were two main local mail clients for the commandline with good emacs,vim bindings: notmuch and mu. Both store mail locally and both use xapian for efficient local searching.

When I was choosing between the two, there was one big difference between the two: notmuch was built around an idea that you mark your messages with tags for organization, while mu assumed you organize stuff into IMAP folders. The notmuch tag database is not a standard IMAP concept, so syncing your IMAP directories wouldn't sync your tags, and moving from one machine to another required extra work. mu by contrast just does the normal IMAP thing, so you sync the IMAP on one machine, and all your other machines can read the IMAP data, and that's it.

I've been using mu for years, and it's fantastic. From personal experience, the tags/folders distinction is mostly immaterial: the vast majority of searches are for text or sender or subject, or something.

If I'm misrepresenting notmuch here, somebody please correct me!

I switched to mbsync plus notmuch-emacs a few months ago, after having been a loyal Thunderbird user for ~15 years. I had to change my workflow, but the new one is much better and I do not plan to go back.

I have always failed to regularly use TODO apps to remember stuff to do. So with Thunderbird I settled on the habit of keeping all the emails that required some action as «unread». This worked because I never fail to check my email during the workday and unread emails are easily recognizable in Thunderbird because they are highlighted in bold. However, in the end it was not optimal because not-urgent emails slowly crawled outside of the visible space in the email list, and it happened more than not that I forgot those emails.

Since I switched to notmuch, I archive every email that does not require more action on my side, with the result that my inbox looks far less cluttered and only contains those emails that still need some action. It's true that I could have used the «Archived» folder in Thunderbird for the same purpose, and for some time before switching to notmuch I even tried. But it never worked well, because when it happens that I have to recover an archived email I had to fight against Thunderbird search tools, which are quite lacking: they are quite slow and I've never understood how to run complex search queries.

On the contrary, notmuch search is awesome: powerful [1] and insanely fast.

Apart from this workflow, I'm loving the fact that I can write emails using Emacs. It's my daily driver and I have a heavily customized setup, so it's really fast for me to type new emails, copy-and-paste snippets of code, reformat paragraphs the way I want, etc.

One nice side effect of the switch is that I finally settled to dispose my old Outlook account (it's really hard to configure mbsync to use it!) and only use Gmail. The number of missed emails dropped significantly, as now I have only one email address to check.

[1] https://notmuchmail.org/manpages/notmuch-search-terms-7/

If you want to setup Gmail/Gsuite with Mutt/notmuch, I wrote up an article on how to do so here: https://www.jevy.org/articles/neomutt-lieer-notmuch/

Hope it helps!

I used this for a while with the 'alot' frontend[0] (before work moved to a different mail system and broke my set-up). It really does live up to the claims on the home page.

If you like TUIs (especially vim) but find things like mutt to be a bit too basic or inflexible, give this combination a try.

0: https://github.com/pazz/alot

I use mbsync, mutt, and notmuch. The searching is superb with notmuch and the level of integration with mutt is great.

I thought this was the typical use case - reading the first few comments here…I guess it integrates well with many clients.

I use bower for my regular email client. It can connect to a remote machine with notmuch over ssh. It's fairly sparse on the features, but I love it.

As a bonus, it's written in a fairly niche programming language: mercury, which is a strongly typed prolog dialect.

1: https://github.com/wangp/bower

notmuch can search gpg encrypted mail, it is superb and seamless. I worked somewhere where all internal e-mail was encrypted by default and notmuch was a godsend for my productivity. It’s like using gmail over encrypted mail.

Admittedly, this is an edge case. But if you happen to do a lot of encrypted emailing I don’t know if anything else like notmuch.

Does IMAP search not give you most of this functionality? I wrote a little mh-like cli for IMAP awhile back (https://github.com/pjz/mhi) that lets me search just fine, though it's admittedly single-folder-at-a-time search. I did make it composable though (eg. `pick` returns a valid message-list`, so I can `scan $(pick from somesender)` or `rmm $(pick from knownspammer)`

I use thunderbird for most of my email reading, and MHI for searching and scripting. I set up a cron job on an always-up machine that does periodic auto-refiling for me; it's not quite 'on receipt' actions, but it's still handy.

Last time I checked I disliked the size of search index folders and files. So I am sticking to mairix, which integrates well with mutt and is small and fast.

I have hosted my own email for over 18 years and I have found notmuch quite useful, albeit not on a daily basis, but it has really proved its worth in several occasions where I just had to find a specific email. It really is very fast and will traverse your 5GiB maildir in less than a second.

I tried using a combo of mbsync, notmuch, and notmuch-emacs to start migrating away from Gmail's UI (and eventually moving away from their service).

I found, though, that mbsync failed to download updates after the initial bulk load.

Has anyone else run into this, and/or found a good way to use notmuch with gmail?

I don't quite get the concept of local mail in the 21st century. Long gone are the times where we had exactly one computer. What good does the e-mail do me if it is local on (one of) my desktop(s), when I need it on my laptop/phone/pad?

What's wrong with IMAP?