Ubuntu Manpage: notmuch - thread-based email index, search, and tagging

Provided by: notmuch_0.37-1ubuntu2_amd64

NAME

       notmuch - thread-based email index, search, and tagging

SYNOPSIS

       notmuch [option ...] command [arg ...]

DESCRIPTION

       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 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.

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 https://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.

OPTIONS

       Supported global options for notmuch include

       --help [command-name]
              Print a synopsis of available commands and exit. With  an  optional  command  name,
              show the man page for that subcommand.

       --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 empty string is a permitted and  sometimes  useful
              value  of  FILE,  which  tells  notmuch to use only configuration metadata from the
              database.

       --uuid=HEX
              Enforce that the database UUID (a unique identifier which persists until  e.g.  the
              database  is  compacted) is HEX; exit with an error if it is not. This is useful to
              detect rollover in modification counts on messages. You can find  this  UUID  using
              e.g. notmuch count --lastmod

       All  global  options except --config can also be specified after the command. For example,
       notmuch subcommand --uuid=HEX is equivalent to notmuch --uuid=HEX subcommand.

COMMANDS

SETUP
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(1) before running notmuch
setup.

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

OTHER COMMANDS
Several of the notmuch commands accept search terms with a common syntax. See
notmuch-search-terms for more details on the supported syntax.

The notmuch-search, notmuch-show, notmuch-address and notmuch-count commands are used to
query the email database.

The notmuch-reply command is useful for preparing a template for an email reply.

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

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

The notmuch-config command can be used to get or set settings in the notmuch configuration
file.

EXTERNAL COMMANDS
If the given command is not known to notmuch, notmuch tries to execute the external
notmuch-<subcommand> in PATH instead. This allows users to have their own notmuch related
tools to be run via the notmuch command. By design, this does not allow notmuch's own
commands to be overridden using external commands. The environment variable
NOTMUCH_CONFIG will be set according to --config, if the latter is present.

OPTION SYNTAX
All options accepting an argument can be used with '=' or ':' as a separator. Except for
boolean options (which would be ambiguous), a space can also be used as a separator. The
following are all equivalent:

notmuch --config=alt-config config get user.name
notmuch --config:alt-config config get user.name
notmuch --config alt-config config get user.name

DUPLICATE MESSAGE FILES

       Notmuch considers the Message-ID to be the primary identifier of message. Per RFC 5322 the
       Message-ID is supposed to be globally unique, but this fails in two  distinct  ways.  When
       you  receive copies of a message via a mechanism like Cc or via a mailing list, the copies
       are typically interchangeable. In the case of some broken mail sending software, the  same
       Message-ID  is  used for completely unrelated messages. The options search --duplicate and
       show --duplicate options provide  the  user  with  control  over  which  message  file  is
       displayed.  Front  ends  will  need  to  provide  their  own interface, see e.g. the Emacs
       front-end Dealing with duplicates.

ENVIRONMENT

       The following environment variables can be used to control the behavior of notmuch.

       NOTMUCH_CONFIG
              Specifies the location of the notmuch configuration file.  See  notmuch-config  for
              details.

       NOTMUCH_DATABASE
              Specifies the location of the notmuch database. See notmuch-config for details.

       NOTMUCH_PROFILE
              Selects among notmuch configurations. See notmuch-config for details.

       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.

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.libera.chat, channel: #notmuch).

AUTHOR

       Carl Worth and many others

COPYRIGHT

       2009-2022, Carl Worth and many others