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

[Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org>]

On Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:39:03 +0100, Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com> wrote:
> this sounds interesting, but I'd like to know:
> what is the difference with, for example mh-search, or mairix?

I'm not familiar with mh-search, so I can't comment there.

As for mairix, I think a big improvement that notmuch has is its search
syntax, (including phrase-based searching). With notmuch searches look
like this:

        notmuch search from:carsten.dominik and mairix
        notmuch search subject:"emacs interface" and "Carl Worth"
        notmuch search tag:important

Of course, that all falls out almost entirely due to just being based on
Xapian.

Mairix has the interesting mode of being able to deliver search results
as a maildir of symlinks. We might add something like that to notmuch.

Some things that notmuch has that mairix doesn't and that aren't related
just to general Xapian features:

  * A "notmuch show" command that does proper threading/nesting of
    messages.

  * The ability to add/remove arbitrary tags to any message and use them
    in search terms later.

  * An emacs interface to display search results, quickly filter search
    results by adding a term, display a thread from the search-results
    view, start composing a reply from a thread view, etc.

I haven't compared performance and scalability of mairix and notmuch.
And all of the above is just from my own recollection of using mairix
for a few months so I may have gotten some details wrong.

-Carl