Re: converting from nmh: how to?

[David Bremner <david@tethera.net>]

Greg Minshall <minshall@umich.edu> writes:

> hi.  apologies if this is an FAQ.
>
> i'm exploring notmuch (via the emacs front-end).  i have 1.2M e-mail
> messages sorted into 200 or so nmh folders.  (*)
>
> after running `notmuch new`, i end up with 1.2M "unread" messages, all
> in "inbox".
>
> i would like to end up with the "inbox" tag applied only to messages
> actually in my nmh +inbox folder; messages from *other* nmh folders
> should end up with a tag derived from that folder name.

If I remember how mh works you should be able to use something like

notmuch tag -inbox '*'
notmuch tag +inbox path:relative/path/to/inbox/folder

you may want to use "notmuch dump > backup.tags" before some bold experiments.

> and, i would like to have the "unread" tag only apply to messages that
> nmh thinks are unseen.
>
> (iiuc, nmh keeps track of unseen messages in ".mh_sequences" local to
> each nmh folder; i don't think i care about any other sequences,
> including "cur", in any of the ".mh_sequences" files.)
>
> is there a known procedure for accomplishing this?  or, thoughts on
> same?

notmuch does not index filenames, so that makes things a bit more
challenging. With a little scripting, you could extract the message-id
for message 'n' and pass that to notmuch. I'd probably write a python
script (and use the 'notmuch2' module), but it's doable as a shell
script also (given some hack to extract the message-id).