Re: Is anybody using "NotMuch" as an email client?

[Jon Fineman <jon@fineman.me>]

Dr Rainer Woitok <rainer.woitok@gmail.com> writes:

> Greetings,
>
> currently I'm using "Rmail" for processing my email.   It works,  but it
> also is rather spartan sometimes.  Somewhere someone mentioned "NotMuch"
> but from searching the Internet, I'm not yet sure it is what I want.
>
> Currently I'm using the traditional approach of storing related mails in
> "mbox" type mail files.   Rather infrequently I have the need of search-
> ing all mails in an mbox for a string or regular expression.  Apart from
> reading and writing mails  I need to reply,  to forward and occasionally
> to resend mails.   As for downloading attachments, it's mostly enough to
> download them one by one  but sometimes I want to download them all in a
> single sweep.
>
> Is anybody out there  using  "NotMuch"  as their daily  email driver and
> willing to share their experience?
>
> Sincerely,
>   Rainer


I use it. It has some quirks, but notmuch coupled with the emacs gui
notmuch is really a full fledged email client. It doesn't create HTML
emails, but can view them via eww or w3m. If I have a complicated
email I will view it in firefox. But I try to avoid those.

I found to make it easy and seamless I needed quite a few settings,
elisp functions and shell scripts. By design it doesn't delete emails
and is tag and thread based. I created some scripts modeled after
their suggestions on their site to tag and then delete emails on my
own.

I think the ability to search and actually find an email is unparalleled
in today's clients.

I like their use of the Maildir format for storing emails. One file
per email. But you need offlineimap or mbsync to sync email up and
down. Those scripts alone can be tedious to set up. The side benefit
is it gives me a backup of my mail.

You might also want to ask on their email list at:
<notmuch@notmuchmail.org>

Their web site is at <https://notmuchmail.org/>