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

[Richard Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com>]

Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org> writes:

> 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.
>

<OT for org-mode>

I just thought (for completeness) I might mention Dovecot IMAP indexing
at this stage since I know a good few here use gnus and IMAP : thanks to
Tassilo Horn for the heads up about it. My select element is:-

       gnus-select-method '(nnimap "mymail"
				   (nnimap-stream tls)
				   (nnimap-authinfo-file "~/.authinfo.gpg")
				   (nnimap-address "my-server.net")
				   (nnimap-expunge-on-close always)
				   (nnimap-nov-is-evil nil)
				   (nnir-search-engine imap))

Note the nnir-search component.

Then a key to control it:-

     ;; Fast index based mail search on nnmairix server.
     (define-key gnus-group-mode-map (kbd "<f3>")
     'gnus-group-make-nnir-group)

And finally the Dovecot config  (/etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf):-

    protocol imap {
      mail_plugins = fts fts_squat
      listen = *:143
      ssl_listen = *:993
    }

    plugin {
     fts = squat
     fts_squat = partial=4 full=10
    }

It will index when you first search that group.

regards

r.