IMAP with server deletion

[Sam Halliday]

Hello all,

I'm using emacs + notmuch + offlineimap + msmtp to manage my Gmail.

My gmail account is starting to get so big that an offline sync is time
consuming.

I'd like to delete messages on the server, but keep them locally. Is
that possible with IMAP?

There is one complicating factor that stops me from being able to use
fetch-only POP3: I'd like to keep files on the server if they have the
+flagged tag, which is equivalent to "starred" in the Gmail interface.

Has anybody got a setup similar to this?


-- 
Best regards,
Sam


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Re: use font-face instead of explicit colouring

[Sam Halliday]

That's a shame. Having light/dark alternatives are OK as a workaround but
it's a shame this can't just all be done with faces. I don't see why there
needs to be a string to face lookup map, why not just put the string in the
face name?
On 5 Mar 2016 11:00 a.m., "Mark Walters" <markwalters1...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Hi
>
> On Sat, 05 Mar 2016, Sam Halliday <sam.halli...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I should say that I am aware of the workaround, e.g.
> >
> > (setq
> >   notmuch-search-line-faces '(("unread" :weight bold)
> >   ("flagged" :inherit
> 'font-lock-string-face)))
> >
> > but this must be applied per-user. If you removed this defcustom and had
> > unread/flagged/other faces, then themes (such as darcula) would be able
> > to provide sensible defaults out of the box.
>
> I am not sure I see how this would work without cluttering up the
> customize options significantly. The notmuch-search-line-faces allows
> selecting the face based on any tag (so for example I use different
> colours for emails tagged "work", and tagged "waiting"). We could have
> additional notmuch-search-line-unread-face which could then be  used in
> the above -- but now the user has two places to customize the same thing.
>
> How do you see this working?
>
> (We probably could make the default depend on light or dark theme to make
> the default more usable.)
>
> Best wishes
>
> Mark
>
> >
> > Sam Halliday <sam.halli...@gmail.com> writes:
> >
> >> [ text/plain ]
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I use a dark theme and many of the colour choices of notmuch collide
> >> with my theme. However, notmuch is explicitly adding information such as
> >> "blue foreground" instead of using faces that I can customise.
> >>
> >> Could you please consider using faces instead of explicit colours?
> >>
> >> [ text/plain ]
> >>
> >> --
> >> Best regards,
> >> Sam
> >> [ signature.asc: application/pgp-signature ]
> >
> > --
> > Best regards,
> > Sam
> > ___
> > notmuch mailing list
> > notmuch@notmuchmail.org
> > https://notmuchmail.org/mailman/listinfo/notmuch
>
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Re: use font-face instead of explicit colouring

[Sam Halliday]

I should say that I am aware of the workaround, e.g.

(setq
  notmuch-search-line-faces '(("unread" :weight bold)
  ("flagged" :inherit 'font-lock-string-face)))

but this must be applied per-user. If you removed this defcustom and had
unread/flagged/other faces, then themes (such as darcula) would be able
to provide sensible defaults out of the box.

Sam Halliday <sam.halli...@gmail.com> writes:

> [ text/plain ]
> Hi,
>
> I use a dark theme and many of the colour choices of notmuch collide
> with my theme. However, notmuch is explicitly adding information such as
> "blue foreground" instead of using faces that I can customise.
>
> Could you please consider using faces instead of explicit colours?
>
> [ text/plain ]
>
> -- 
> Best regards,
> Sam
> [ signature.asc: application/pgp-signature ]

-- 
Best regards,
Sam


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use font-face instead of explicit colouring

[Sam Halliday]

Hi,

I use a dark theme and many of the colour choices of notmuch collide
with my theme. However, notmuch is explicitly adding information such as
"blue foreground" instead of using faces that I can customise.

Could you please consider using faces instead of explicit colours?


-- 
Best regards,
Sam


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github mirror

[Sam Halliday]

I have now tried mu4e and I don't like it nearly as much as notmuch, so
I'm sticking with this and aim to help out where notmuch falls short on
tag syncing between machines :-)

David Mazieres  writes:
> the complexity of altering files is not worth it.

I agree. Immutability is a great thing. I like the proposed approach of
having a single "archive" Maildir folder (which notmuch really uses),
and then copying files into other folders to flag them as having a tag
or not (but these folders are not indexed by notmuch, avoiding
duplication problems).

It sounds like Gmail would play well with this setup and I assume most
IMAP servers will be smart enough to treat these as references to the
same immutable message. There is a potential persistent memory cost on
the client side due to the excessive copying, but somebody pointed out
that hard links would solve the problem locally. That just means the
IMAP sync applications just need to be a little smarter about how they
communicate with the server. I'm not averse to writing a tailored IMAP
syncing app, although it would be in a real language like Scala or
Haskell :-P Some sick part of me is also bizarrely intrigued by writing
it in elisp.

I am going on an extended holiday very shortly, but I hope one of you
does some more feasibility testing on this during that time: when I
return I will most likely help out with contributions.


> what you want is an imap server built on top of the notmuch library

That wouldn't appeal to me: I want to continue using my gmail account as
it is well integrated with a variety of other services, gratis and the
spam filtering is incredibly strong.


-- 
Best regards,
Sam
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github mirror

[Sam Halliday]

Austin Clements writes:
> Quoth Sam Halliday on Apr 27 at 12:09 pm:
>> But in any case, my RFE/question was this: how hard would it be to have
>> an optional mode of behaviour where tags are stored in the message
>> itself, so that syncing with an IMAP server (e.g. via offlineimap)
>> would make the tags available on all devices.
>
> FWIW, we've discussed being able to configure a bi-directional mapping
> between folders and notmuch tags, using hard links (or simply message
> copies) to map messages with multiple tags to multiple file system
> folders.  There's been some prototyping [1], though no serious code.
> If this did happen, you'd be able to sync Gmail labels with notmuch
> tags without any help from OfflineIMAP (OfflineIMAP could perform
> better and use less disk space if it knew how to set up hard links
> when talking to Gmail, but this would be entirely independent of
> notmuch).  You might also be able to work out cross-device sync, using
> IMAP folder synchronization as a channel for tag synchronization.

I am extremely interested in the progress of this. Please keep me
updated if anything moves in this area. Hard links are a secondary
concern (that could be independently scripted if memory is an issue, and
is only worth the effort if the label and tag syncing works).

Re: github mirror

[Sam Halliday]

Austin Clements writes:
 Quoth Sam Halliday on Apr 27 at 12:09 pm:
 But in any case, my RFE/question was this: how hard would it be to have
 an optional mode of behaviour where tags are stored in the message
 itself, so that syncing with an IMAP server (e.g. via offlineimap)
 would make the tags available on all devices.

 FWIW, we've discussed being able to configure a bi-directional mapping
 between folders and notmuch tags, using hard links (or simply message
 copies) to map messages with multiple tags to multiple file system
 folders.  There's been some prototyping [1], though no serious code.
 If this did happen, you'd be able to sync Gmail labels with notmuch
 tags without any help from OfflineIMAP (OfflineIMAP could perform
 better and use less disk space if it knew how to set up hard links
 when talking to Gmail, but this would be entirely independent of
 notmuch).  You might also be able to work out cross-device sync, using
 IMAP folder synchronization as a channel for tag synchronization.

I am extremely interested in the progress of this. Please keep me
updated if anything moves in this area. Hard links are a secondary
concern (that could be independently scripted if memory is an issue, and
is only worth the effort if the label and tag syncing works).
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Re: github mirror

[Sam Halliday]

I have now tried mu4e and I don't like it nearly as much as notmuch, so
I'm sticking with this and aim to help out where notmuch falls short on
tag syncing between machines :-)

David Mazieres dm-list-email-notm...@scs.stanford.edu writes:
 the complexity of altering files is not worth it.

I agree. Immutability is a great thing. I like the proposed approach of
having a single archive Maildir folder (which notmuch really uses),
and then copying files into other folders to flag them as having a tag
or not (but these folders are not indexed by notmuch, avoiding
duplication problems).

It sounds like Gmail would play well with this setup and I assume most
IMAP servers will be smart enough to treat these as references to the
same immutable message. There is a potential persistent memory cost on
the client side due to the excessive copying, but somebody pointed out
that hard links would solve the problem locally. That just means the
IMAP sync applications just need to be a little smarter about how they
communicate with the server. I'm not averse to writing a tailored IMAP
syncing app, although it would be in a real language like Scala or
Haskell :-P Some sick part of me is also bizarrely intrigued by writing
it in elisp.

I am going on an extended holiday very shortly, but I hope one of you
does some more feasibility testing on this during that time: when I
return I will most likely help out with contributions.


 what you want is an imap server built on top of the notmuch library

That wouldn't appeal to me: I want to continue using my gmail account as
it is well integrated with a variety of other services, gratis and the
spam filtering is incredibly strong.


-- 
Best regards,
Sam


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github mirror

[Sam Halliday]

David Mazieres  writes:
> Sam Halliday  writes:
>> But in any case, my RFE/question was this: how hard would it be to have
>> an optional mode of behaviour where tags are stored in the message
>> itself, so that syncing with an IMAP server (e.g. via offlineimap)
>> would make the tags available on all devices. This would negate the need
>> for workarounds, such as shared notmuch databases, when users have
>> multiple machines.
>
> The problem is that different imap servers store tags in different
> ways.  Since notmuch does not use imap, it would be hard for notmuch to
> synchronize the tags, other than the standard ones (for which notmuch
> already has support).
>
> One thing you could do is build an external tool that synchronizes
> notmuch tags and spawns an imap server in preauth mode to sync the tags.
> (That would be yet another use for the ctime values we have discussed on
> this list.)

The improvements to offlineimap to use the mail header hack might work
well for both of us. Currently the only way to add/remove "labels" (a
gmail concept) is to copy/move mail between folders. And this is how
notmuch "tags" are synced. But with outstanding pull request, this can
all be managed via email headers and that means you *only* need to
synchronise your "All Mail" folder.

So, I'd be interested to see what your code could do in that world :-)
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[Sam Halliday] Re: github mirror

[Sam Halliday]

and another one

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[Sam Halliday] Re: github mirror

[Sam Halliday]

Sorry, I replied to jani and not the list...

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github mirror

[Sam Halliday]

Dear NotMuch,

I have just started using notmuch and I really love it! I've been using
web interfaces and proprietary mail clients for almost a decade and mutt
before that (because I never got on well with rmail or gnus). Now, I'm
trying to get all my life-hacker aficionados to follow suit.

I was wanting to submit an RFE for you and to browse your source code to
see how hard it would be to implement, but I was disappointed that it is
all hosted on your own git repository with no issue tracker.

While I appreciate that you probably use notmuch as your work flow
manager, it is also quite common to use a social website such as github
or getsatisfaction to interface with users. In my experience, github
dramatically increases the number of contributions from users, in the
form of what github calls "pull requests" (if you're a git user but not
a github user, the term is confusing).

Would it be possible to have a github project for notmuch? I'm certain
the git repositories could be synchronised easily.

A bridge between github's issue tracker and notmuch would be entirely
possible: they have an API that would allow addition and removal of
tags, as well as editing tickets. Actually, I would probably use such a
thing :-)

But in any case, my RFE/question was this: how hard would it be to have
an optional mode of behaviour where tags are stored in the message
itself, so that syncing with an IMAP server (e.g. via offlineimap)
would make the tags available on all devices. This would negate the need
for workarounds, such as shared notmuch databases, when users have
multiple machines.

It would also allow applications like offlineimap to introduce a gmail
plugin that would copy the message into a folder according to its tags,
so gmail labels and notmuch tags would be in sync.

Best regards,
Sam

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[Sam Halliday]

Dear NotMuch,

I have just started using notmuch and I really love it! I've been using
web interfaces and proprietary mail clients for almost a decade and mutt
before that (because I never got on well with rmail or gnus). Now, I'm
trying to get all my life-hacker aficionados to follow suit.

I was wanting to submit an RFE for you and to browse your source code to
see how hard it would be to implement, but I was disappointed that it is
all hosted on your own git repository with no issue tracker.

While I appreciate that you probably use notmuch as your work flow
manager, it is also quite common to use a social website such as github
or getsatisfaction to interface with users. In my experience, github
dramatically increases the number of contributions from users, in the
form of what github calls pull requests (if you're a git user but not
a github user, the term is confusing).

Would it be possible to have a github project for notmuch? I'm certain
the git repositories could be synchronised easily.

A bridge between github's issue tracker and notmuch would be entirely
possible: they have an API that would allow addition and removal of
tags, as well as editing tickets. Actually, I would probably use such a
thing :-)

But in any case, my RFE/question was this: how hard would it be to have
an optional mode of behaviour where tags are stored in the message
itself, so that syncing with an IMAP server (e.g. via offlineimap)
would make the tags available on all devices. This would negate the need
for workarounds, such as shared notmuch databases, when users have
multiple machines.

It would also allow applications like offlineimap to introduce a gmail
plugin that would copy the message into a folder according to its tags,
so gmail labels and notmuch tags would be in sync.

Best regards,
Sam



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[Sam Halliday] Re: github mirror

[Sam Halliday]

Sorry, I replied to jani and not the list...

---BeginMessage---
Jani Nikula j...@nikula.org writes:
 We also maintain fairly high standards for the contributions we
 accept, so the review has a significant role in the process.

In my experience the github pull review process is by far superior to
any other solution. If you've never done a github review, I would
strongly recommend doing one just for fun to see what you think of
it. You can basically add line comments in the code and have a
discussion on the finer points of commits. And then, to address those
comments, it's as simple as the contributor pushing to their repo again
and the review is updated. Repeat until the merge button is pressed
(or the equivalent git commands, of course).

But you are correct, it would be a big change from your current
setup.

 Would it be possible to have a github project for notmuch? I'm certain
 the git repositories could be synchronised easily.

 This part is trivial, but on its own it doesn't provide any obvious
 benefits.

The benefit would be - perhaps - an increase in the number of patches
for you to review :-). Plus, free hosting, and easier to track down who
aims to contribute to the project. It would also expose you to a larger
audience. I find a lot of cool projects just by jumping around
interesting developers on github.

I can only cite my own experience, but I have received a lot more
contributions (out of the blue) since moving to github than I did when I
was running repositories on savannah, sourceforge or google code. It's
just so much easier to click the fork button, then make some commits,
and click the pull request button. If I were contributing to you, it
requires having to learn your process, create diffs and then attach
them, and then after a review it means tracking down the bits of the
code you're referring to and manually reconciling that with my repo and
sending you more diffs. Using github, it's like all open source
developers agree on a basic set of common processes.


 A bridge between github's issue tracker and notmuch would be entirely
 possible: they have an API that would allow addition and removal of
 tags, as well as editing tickets. Actually, I would probably use such a
 thing :-)

 I'm sure all of this would be entirely possible; I'm not so sure it
 would be worth the effort. But hey, if someone is willing to do the
 work, patches are welcome. By email. ;)

Heh, well I might just end up doing something like that because the more
I use notmuch, the more I think it could be used for other parts of my
workflow. For example, I wrote https://github.com/fommil/zibaldone a
couple of years ago for a friend but I never quite got it to a stage
where I would use it myself. If I could use notmuch to manage a large
collection of notes, that would be interesting, and would mean I could
drop to the zibaldone visual (auto-cluster) mode and use a touchscreen
to move the ideas around and find new connections. I'm using Lucene in
that project, but I could rewrite the backend to use notmuch (or xapian
directly). There are a few tickets on that project I'd love to implement
(on the machine learning side) but on their own are not convincing
enough for me to start using it.

That said, Zibaldone and note organisation is low priority. If I were to
do anything with notmuch it would be improving syncing with gmail (so a
tag in notmuch equates to a label in their interface) or at the very
least sharing the same tag structure across multiple notmuch
machines. Being able to see the same thing on multiple machines using
one canonical data source is really important for me.



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[Sam Halliday] Re: github mirror

[Sam Halliday]

and another one

---BeginMessage---
Sam Halliday sam.halli...@gmail.com writes:
 If I were to do anything with notmuch it would be improving syncing
 with gmail (so a tag in notmuch equates to a label in their interface)
 or at the very least sharing the same tag structure across multiple
 notmuch machines. Being able to see the same thing on multiple
 machines using one canonical data source is really important for me.

FYI on gmail integration. @aroig has created a bunch of patches that
use a mail header for syncing the gmail labels with offlineimap. This is
a potential route to implementing persistent notmuch tagging on the
server side: https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap/pull/43


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Re: github mirror

[Sam Halliday]

David Mazieres dm-list-email-notm...@scs.stanford.edu writes:
 Sam Halliday sam.halli...@gmail.com writes:
 But in any case, my RFE/question was this: how hard would it be to have
 an optional mode of behaviour where tags are stored in the message
 itself, so that syncing with an IMAP server (e.g. via offlineimap)
 would make the tags available on all devices. This would negate the need
 for workarounds, such as shared notmuch databases, when users have
 multiple machines.

 The problem is that different imap servers store tags in different
 ways.  Since notmuch does not use imap, it would be hard for notmuch to
 synchronize the tags, other than the standard ones (for which notmuch
 already has support).

 One thing you could do is build an external tool that synchronizes
 notmuch tags and spawns an imap server in preauth mode to sync the tags.
 (That would be yet another use for the ctime values we have discussed on
 this list.)

The improvements to offlineimap to use the mail header hack might work
well for both of us. Currently the only way to add/remove labels (a
gmail concept) is to copy/move mail between folders. And this is how
notmuch tags are synced. But with outstanding pull request, this can
all be managed via email headers and that means you *only* need to
synchronise your All Mail folder.

So, I'd be interested to see what your code could do in that world :-)


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