Re: Notmuch: An emacs interface for fast global search and tagging of email

[Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org>]

Jan Janak <jan@ryngle.com> writes:

Hi Jan,

>>     gnus:group                                Gnus group link
>>     gnus:group#id                             Gnus article link
>> (Manual: 4.3 External links)
>
> Notmuch goes beyond what the links above can do. Having your mail
> indexed with notmuch is kind of like having your own local copy of
> gmail with its powerful search options.

Hm, currently I use a local dovecot imap server for storing all my mails
and use Gnus' nnir to search using the dovecot full text search (it
indexes automatically).

This works pretty good, but the nnir interface or imap search in general
is not so advanced, and possibly I could do better querying with
notmuch.  Since dovecot runs local, all the mails are local, too, and I
could index them with notmuch.  But some questions come in mind:

1. Does notmuch require some special mailbox format?

   I use dovecot's dbox format, which is somehow similar to Maildir (one
   file per message), but there are some special lines with escape chars
   like ^A, ^B, ^C.

2. Is there a way to search for an article with notmuch, read id there
   and then get into Gnus' summary buffer with this article opened, so
   that I can reply?

   What I basically need for that was an easy way to extract the
   message-id and the mail file's path.

3. Does the underlying indexing tool somehow recognize new messages and
   index them on the fly, so that the index is always up to date?

Bye,
Tassilo