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

[Jan Janak <jan@ryngle.com>]

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 2:16 PM, Giovanni Ridolfi
<giovanni.ridolfi@yahoo.it> wrote:
> --- Mer 18/11/09, Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org> ha scritto:
>> The idea is that maybe org-mode users would like to be able
>> to reference
>> email messages for todo items, etc. and that perhaps
>> integrating with notmuch would make sense.
>
> well in Org-mode is it already possible to have links
> to "mails" e.g.:
>
>     mailto:adent@galaxy.net                   Mail link
>     vm:folder                                 VM folder link
>     vm:folder#id                              VM message link
>     vm://myself@some.where.org/folder#id      VM on remote machine
>     wl:folder                                 WANDERLUST folder link
>     wl:folder#id                              WANDERLUST message link
>     mhe:folder                                MH-E folder link
>     mhe:folder#id                             MH-E message link
>     rmail:folder                              RMAIL folder link
>     rmail:folder#id                           RMAIL message link
>     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.

If integrated properly with org-mode, we could refer to one particular
message using its message-id (regardless of the folder/directory it is
in), we could refer to whole threads. And when new messages in the
thread arrive, notmuch updates the thread automatically and you will
see everything when you activate the link.

Another interesting possibility would be adding support for notmuch
search strings to org-mode, so that you could do something like:
"notmuch:foo bar" and when you activate the link, a list of messages
that contain the text would show up in a notmuch buffer.

And so on. Notmuch is currently in very early stage, but I think it
has the potential to become a perfect complement for org-mode.

With support for full-text search in local email archives, org-mode
will be even harder to beat than it is now ;).

> By the way, does  notmuch depend on Xapian?

Yes.

  -- Jan