Hi, I indexed my archive of emails from recent years with notmuch (about 10k messages so not much). I have quite a lot of messages 'notmuch new' ignores as non-mail files, about 1000 of them. They are not obviously malformed, meaning that the files certainly look like emails when opened in a text editor. I'd like to find out why these files are ignored, and if there is something I can do to fix them. Of course I'd like to have a complete database of my old emails, with nothing falling through the cracks like this.
The vast majority of these ignored mails are not ignored after I transfer them with offlineimap to another computer. I can non-ignore these files probably by copying the renamed file back to the mail server, so this is fixable. Offlineimap shouldn't mess with the file's contents, so is there something that can cause notmuch to ignore a file based on its name? Looking at the rest of the ignored messages most of them seem to have very large attachments, but there are possibly others. There is only maybe 20 of these kinds of emails so I can try to fix them manually. Still, it would help if I knew what exactly caused notmuch to ignore the file. I understand most of the message parsing is done with gmime. Does gmime give any diagnostics on parse errors that could be used to give a reason for thinking a file is not mail? I understand that the list of non-mail files is stored in the notmuch database and the files are completely ignored from there on. This actually makes it harder to debug these kind of issues since the list of ignored mails is only visible on the first invocation of 'notmuch new', unless the files are moved around. Is there some way to extract the list of ignored files from the database for inspection? Maybe 'notmuch new' could have some kind of --unignore-non-mail switch that would reconsider previously ignored files. -- Perttu Luukko