Notmuch - thread-based email index, search and tagging.

Notmuch is a system for indexing, searching, reading, and tagging large collections of email messages. It uses the Xapian library to provide fast, full-text search with a convenient search syntax.

Notmuch is free software, released under the GNU General Public License version 3 (or later).

Building notmuch

See the INSTALL file for notes on compiling and installing notmuch.

Contacting users and developers

The website for Notmuch is:

http://notmuchmail.org

The mailing list address for the notmuch community is:

[email protected]

We welcome any sort of questions, comments, kudos, or code there.

Subscription is not required, (but if you do subscribe you'll avoid any delay due to moderation). See the website for subscription information.

There is also an IRC channel dedicated to talk about using and developing notmuch:

IRC server: irc.freenode.net
Channel:    #notmuch

Interface options

Notmuch includes a "notmuch" command-line interface to the system. This is not a very convenient interface and it is not expected that users will find it satisfying. Instead, there are two option for obtaining a more sophisticated interface:

 1. Build on top of the "notmuch" command-line interface.

This might be a reasonable option for a very text-oriented
client environment. For example, an emacs-based interface for
notmuch is already under development and is available in the
notmuch.el file in this distribution.

If someone were to write a curses-based interface, or similar,
it might also be reasonable to build on the "notmuch"
command-line interface.

 2. Build on top of the notmuch library interface.

This is a better choice for developing an interface that has
full control of the presentation of email threads and
messages. It is expected that anyone integrating Notmuch into
an existing, graphical email program use the notmuch library
interface.

The public interface to the notmuch library is contained in
the notmuch.h header file. The "notmuch" command-line program
in notmuch.c can be used as good example code, since it is a
simple program that is written on top of the library
interface.

As can be seen, alternate interfaces to the Notmuch mail system are still in development. We would appreciate any contributions to these efforts.