# Mutt mail indexing on steroids!

**Update 31/03/2012:
[[mutt-notmuch has been integrated upstream|2012/03/mutt-notmuch_is_dead]]
under the name notmuch-mutt.**

I've been using external mail indexing with [Mutt](http://www.mutt.org) for
quite a while now. Before now I haven't given
[Notmuch](http://notmuchmail.org/) a try, as it seemed *too much* experimental
at the time of my initial
[[review of mail indexing tools|2009/10/mail_indexing_for_mutt]].

As there is nothing better than a long oversea flight to perpetrate new hacks,
I've now not only tested it, but also **switched to Notmuch** without looking
back at [maildir-utils](http://code.google.com/p/mu0/) for a split second.

Getting started with Notmuch is trivial:

* Notmuch is [[!debpkgsid notmuch]] in Debian (and maintained by upstream
  author, thanks!)
* `notmuch setup` asks a few questions about the user and then prepare a
  template `~/.notmuch-config`, which is good enough to start
* `notmuch new` does a first run of indexing (which might take a while,
  depending on the size of your maildirs)

Some performance figures: (1) the size of the index is a bit larger than the
size of the mails (on my laptop: 535 Mb of index vs 375 Mb of mails stored in
60 maildirs); (2) even if the underlying indexing engine is the same (Xapian)
as maildir-utils, Notmuch is much faster. With my setup it is so fast that I've
added it as a hook triggered by offlineimap at the end of each synchronization:

        zack@usha:~$ grep -B 1 hook .offlineimaprc
        [Account Upsilon]
        postsynchook = notmuch new

With the big round of new mail downloaded in the morning, it hardly takes more
than a few seconds to update Notmuch index, while with other periodic downloads
Notmuch almost invariably reports "... in almost no time" (i.e. less than 1
second).

## Integrating Notmuch with Mutt

The basic integration I want between Mutt and a mail indexer is the ability of
stating a **search query** interactively and then jump to a **fresh Maildir
containing search results** only. Additionally, given that Notmuch has neat
**thread reconstruction** abilities, I also want to be able to reconstruct on
the fly the thread corresponding to the currently highlighted mail: it comes
handy when a thread has been split across different maildirs, archived, or the
like.

To that end, I've cooked up a little helper, called [[mutt-notmuch]], that
enables to trigger mail searches via a Mutt macro (F8 being my choice) and
reconstruct threads via another (F9). Check the [[manpage|mutt-notmuch.1.html]]
for the 2-liner configuration snippet for your `~/.muttrc`.

Arguably, some of the logics of mutt-notmuch could disappear by adding support
for a `--output=symlinks` flag to Notmuch. A bug report requesting that is
pending: too bad oversea flights are not as good for accessing the Internet as
they are for perpetrating hacks!

### Download

* [mutt-notmuch](https://gitorious.org/mutt-notmuch/mutt-notmuch/blobs/raw/master/mutt-notmuch) - Notmuch (of a) helper for Mutt
* [[mutt-notmuch.1]] ([[html|mutt-notmuch.1.html]])- mutt-notmuch manpage

----

**Update** 10/04/2011: mutt-notmuch code is now available
[via Git](https://gitorious.org/mutt-notmuch).
Resistence to propose your own patches is futile! The above link to
mutt-notmuch has been changed to point to the live Git version.

**Update** 11/02/2012: Git repository has been moved to Gitorious; links
updated accordingly

[[!tag lang/english planet-debian mutt notmuch hack gtd]]