Re: Thanks for notmuch-lore

[Kyle Meyer <kyle@kyleam.com>]

Carl Worth writes:

> On Tue, Feb 01 2022, Tobias Waldekranz wrote:
>> I actually gave up on getting my mailinglists from my email provider,
>> now I just download it directly from lore. I hacked together a script
>> that will scrape a public-inbox repo and convert it to a Maildir:
>>
>> https://github.com/wkz/notmuch-lore
>
> Thanks for sharing this, Tobias. I needed exactly this today, and was
> happy to have found this.
>
> It looks like you've coded something to efficiently do the work that's
> needed periodically, (fetch new emails from the public-inbox git
> repository, convert them to maildir files, and prune away git state
> other than a pointer to what's been converted already).
>
> What I'm missing is the piece to convert over the entire archive from
> the past.

I may be missing something (I didn't know about notmuch-lore before
seeing it mentioned here), but it looks like the initialization step of
notmuch-lore's pre-new handles that already.  You just need to set
`since` far enough back:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
tmphome=$(mktemp -d "${TMPDIR:-/tmp}"/nm-lore-XXXXXXX)
cd "$tmphome"

HOME="$tmphome"
export HOME

mkdir mail
notmuch setup
notmuch new

mkdir -p mail/.notmuch/.lore  mail/.notmuch/hooks

cat >mail/.notmuch/.lore/sources <<'EOF'
[gwl]
url=https://yhetil.org/gwl/git
since=50 years ago
EOF

curl -fSsL \
     https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wkz/notmuch-lore/3e2a13b32b178a4d3296cee6f69ee3491eebdb9f/pre-new \
     >mail/.notmuch/hooks/pre-new
chmod +x mail/.notmuch/hooks/pre-new
./mail/.notmuch/hooks/pre-new
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

That returns the number of messages I expect for that (small) archive:

  $ find mail/gwl -type f | wc -l
  288

Also, just to list some other options in this space, l2md and impibe are
mentioned at <https://public-inbox.org/clients.html> as tools for
converting public-inbox archives into maildir format.  (I haven't used
either myself.)

Tobias, just a note of something I saw when looking over the script:

    $git rev-list $3 | while read sha; do
      $git show $sha:m >$db/$1/new/$sha
    done

This would error if it encounters a deleted message in the archive
because then the commit will have a "d" in the working tree instead of
an "m".  See <https://public-inbox.org/public-inbox-v2-format.html>.