notmuchmail and rmail

notmuchmail and rmail

[Richard Stallman]

Is it feasible to use notmuchmail to search old mail,
but use Rmail to read incoming mail?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
  Use free telephony http://directory.fsf.org/category/tel/

Re: notmuchmail and rmail

[Jameson Graef Rollins]

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On Wed, 19 Oct 2011 19:14:16 -0400, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
> Is it feasible to use notmuchmail to search old mail,
> but use Rmail to read incoming mail?

Hi, Richard.  Notmuch does not modify any messages, so it can be used in
parallel with other mail agents without problem.  Indexing your mail
with notmuch should not affect interfacing with your mail store with any
other MUA.

I'm also quite sure that the notmuch emacs interface could be used in
parallel with other emacs-based mail clients as well.  The notmuch emacs
interface manages it's own set of buffers, and I don't see any reason
why you couldn't be doing your normal Rmail in one buffer, and
conducting notmuch searches in another.

hth.  If you have any other specific questions, let us know.

jamie.

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Re: notmuchmail and rmail

[Daniel Schoepe]

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On Wed, 19 Oct 2011 19:14:16 -0400, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
> Is it feasible to use notmuchmail to search old mail,
> but use Rmail to read incoming mail?

Hello,

notmuch can only index and search through mail that is stored in a
maildir[1], but not in an mbox file. As far as I can tell from the
manual, rmail can fetch mail from a maildir directory, but it will
delete mails from it after doing so.

If rmail can be configured to leave the files in the maildir after
copying them (without ending up with duplicate mails in rmail the next
time it fetches mails), then notmuch and rmail should be usable in
parallel. (Although information such as unread flags etc. will 
not be synchronized back from rmail to notmuch).

Another option would be to convert mbox files containing old mails to a
maildir using something like mb2md[2] and have notmuch index only those
directories. That way, old mail will be searchable with notmuch, but only
after explicitly archiving them this way.

[1] http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html
[2] http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/mb2md/

Cheers,
Daniel

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Re: notmuchmail and rmail

[Jameson Graef Rollins]

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On Sat, 22 Oct 2011 00:49:07 +0200, Daniel Schoepe <daniel@schoepe.org> wrote:
> notmuch can only index and search through mail that is stored in a
> maildir[1], but not in an mbox file. As far as I can tell from the
> manual, rmail can fetch mail from a maildir directory, but it will
> delete mails from it after doing so.

Doh!  Sorry, I didn't realize that about Rmail.  Yes, notmuch requires
that all messages exist in separate files, ala mbox.  Sorry for the
confusion, Richard.

jamie.

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Re: notmuchmail and rmail

[Richard Stallman]

Why not make notmuchmail handle multiple messages per file?

I have around 8000 files, and most of them contain hundreds of
messages.  I'd hate to split them out into one message per file.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
  Use free telephony http://directory.fsf.org/category/tel/

Re: notmuchmail and rmail

[David Bremner]

On Sun, 23 Oct 2011 05:57:41 -0400, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
> Why not make notmuchmail handle multiple messages per file?
> 
> I have around 8000 files, and most of them contain hundreds of
> messages.  I'd hate to split them out into one message per file.

I don't think anyone would be opposed to such a feature, but I'm also
not aware of anybody working on it.

Just to be sure, are you aware of mairix which claims to support rmail
out of the box? I haven't used it, so I can't say anything about how
nice that support is.

David

Re: notmuchmail and rmail

[Richard Stallman]

I tried Mairix a couple of years ago and found it useful but it started
crashing all the time.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
  Use free telephony http://directory.fsf.org/category/tel/