[notmuch] Introducing myself

[Adrian Perez de Castro]

On Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:03:17 -0800, Keith wrote:

> On Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:20:59 +0100, Adrian Perez de Castro  igalia.com> wrote:
>
> > Also, I would like to share one idea I had in mind, that you might find
> > interesting: One thing I have found very annoying is having to re-tag my
> > mail when the indexes get b0rked (it happened a couple of times to me while
> > using Sup), so I was planning to mails as read/unread and adding the tags
> > not just to the index, but to the mail text itself, e.g. by adding a
> > "X-Tags" header field or by reusing the "Keywords" one.
> 
> Easier than that, notmuch (and sup too), provide a 'dump' command which
> just lists all of the message IDs and their associated tags. Makes
> saving tags easy and doesn't involve rewriting messages. I do this once
> a day just before my computer is backed up to an external drive.
> 
> If the index is destroyed, you can reindex the messages and then reapply
> all of the tags with 'notmuch restore'.

I already knew about "dump" and "restore", just wanted to share my
(wild) thought. I have been thinking a bit more, and if I understand
correctly the philosophy of Not Much is that it will only read my mail
and that it will never write to my mailboxes. So my idea makes no sense.
The nice thing is that I could make a script to read the index (or the
output of "notmuch dump") to add the "X-Tags" headers and mark mail :P
Taking into account this and the "do one thing well" motto: there is no
point in adding that to Not Much :)

Regards,

-- 
Adrian Perez de Castro 
Igalia - Free Software Engineering
-- next part --
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: 

[notmuch] Introducing myself

[Adrian Perez de Castro]

Hello to all,

I have just heard about Not Much today in some random Linux-related news
site (LWN?), my name is Adrian Perez and I work as systems administrator
(although I can do some code as well :P). I have always thought that the
ideas behind Sup were great, but after some time using it, I got tired of
the oddities that it has. I also do not like doing things like having to
install Ruby just for reading and sorting mails. Some time ago I thought
about doing something like Not Much and in fact I played a bit with the
Python+Xapian and the Python+Whoosh combinations, because I find relaxing
to code things in Python when I am not working and also it is installed
by default on most distribution. I got to have some mailboxes indexed and
basic searching working a couple of months ago. Lately I have been very
busy and had no time for coding, and them... boom! Not Much appears -- and
it is almost exactly what I was trying to do, but faster. I have been
playing a bit with Not Much today, and I think it has potential.

Also, I would like to share one idea I had in mind, that you might find
interesting: One thing I have found very annoying is having to re-tag my
mail when the indexes get b0rked (it happened a couple of times to me while
using Sup), so I was planning to mails as read/unread and adding the tags
not just to the index, but to the mail text itself, e.g. by adding a
"X-Tags" header field or by reusing the "Keywords" one. This way, the index
could be totally recreated by re-reading the mail directories, and this
would also allow to a tools like OfflineIMAP [1] to get the mails into a
local maildir, tagging and indexing the mails with the e-mail reader and
then syncing back the messages with the "X-Tags" header to the IMAP server.
This would allow to use the mail reader from a different computer and still
have everything tagged finely.

Best regards,


---
[1] http://software.complete.org/software/projects/show/offlineimap

-- 
Adrian Perez de Castro 
Igalia - Free Software Engineering
-- next part --
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: 

[notmuch] Introducing myself

[Keith Packard]

On Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:20:59 +0100, Adrian Perez de Castro  wrote:

> Some time ago I thought
> about doing something like Not Much and in fact I played a bit with the
> Python+Xapian and the Python+Whoosh combinations, because I find relaxing
> to code things in Python when I am not working and also it is installed
> by default on most distribution. I got to have some mailboxes indexed and
> basic searching working a couple of months ago.

Sup certainly started a lot of people thinking...

> Also, I would like to share one idea I had in mind, that you might find
> interesting: One thing I have found very annoying is having to re-tag my
> mail when the indexes get b0rked (it happened a couple of times to me while
> using Sup), so I was planning to mails as read/unread and adding the tags
> not just to the index, but to the mail text itself, e.g. by adding a
> "X-Tags" header field or by reusing the "Keywords" one.

Easier than that, notmuch (and sup too), provide a 'dump' command which
just lists all of the message IDs and their associated tags. Makes
saving tags easy and doesn't involve rewriting messages. I do this once
a day just before my computer is backed up to an external drive.

If the index is destroyed, you can reindex the messages and then reapply
all of the tags with 'notmuch restore'.

--
keith.packard at intel.com