In this guide, I'll show you how I set up notmuch to work with Csup.

In this example, I use fetchmail to fetch mail from my provider, which then passes the mail off to notmuch for storing in a maildir. I have set up notmuch hooks to run fetchmail when Csup runs notmuch new, and to tag the incoming messages based on the sender.

Create maildirs

I used maildirmake to create ~/mail, and to create the sent, draft, and inbox subdirectories in that directory:

maildirmake ~/mail
maildirmake ~/mail/sent
maildirmake ~/mail/draft
maildirmake ~/mail/inbox

Edit notmuch config file

By default, notmuch assumes that your primary maildir is ~/mail. In this example, I use subdirectories ("folders") of that directory for things like the inbox, sent mail, and draft mail.

Before using notmuch the first time, use this command to create an initial configuration file:

notmuch setup

This creates a file ~/.notmuch-config. I edited this file as follows:

• VERY IMPORTANT: Changed synchronize_flags to false. This prevents notmuch from modifying email filenames, which would confuse Csup and cause it to crash when editing draft messages.

• Changed the tags=unread;inbox; line to tags=new;. The reason for this will become clear later in the discussion about using a post-new hook to tag new email.

• Changed the exclude_tags line to exclude_tags=spam;deleted;killed. You can still search for spam, deleted, or killed emails by explicitly using those tags in a search query.

• Add the line extra_headers=Delivered-To;X-Original-To;List-Post;References to the [show] section.

• Left the path value in the [database] section unchanged:

Here is a sample .notmuch-config file with all comments removed:

[database]
path=/home/joeuser/mail
[user]
name=Joe User
primary_email=joeuser@gmail.com
[new]
tags=new;
ignore=
[search]
exclude_tags=spam;deleted;killed
[maildir]
synchronize_flags=false
[show]
extra_headers=Delivered-To;X-Original-To;List-Post;References

Create an index

If you already have email stored in ~/mail, create an initial notmuch index using this command:

notmuch new

It's best to do this before running Csup, because it may it may take several minutes if you have thousands of emails.

fetchmail setup

My ~/.fetchmailrc looks something like this:

poll mail.example.com port 995 with proto POP3 user 'me@example.com'
  pass 'mypassword' options ssl
  mda "notmuch insert --folder=inbox"

This setup uses POP3 to download the mails into the inbox folder of ~/mail, and then deletes the messages from the mail server. I do this because I have no desire or need to read email on a device with no keyboard, a tiny screen, and a non-Linux operating system (i.e., a so-called "smart" phone). However, some users may want to use IMAP (and a tool like offlineimap), so that the mails stay on the server.

notmuch hook setup

First, I created the directory ~/mail/.notmuch/hooks. In that directory, I created two scripts, pre-new and post-new, and marked them as executable using chmod +x.

The pre-new script looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
fetchmail &>>/tmp/fetchmail.log
exit 0

This script saves all fetchmail output in a log file for debugging purposes. It also returns an exit code of 0 in all cases. This is necessary because fetchmail will return a non-zero exit code if there is no new mail to fetch, and that will cause notmuch to fail.

Notmuch runs the pre-new script before it scans the mail directory for new messages.

The post-new script looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
# immediately archive all messages from "me"
#notmuch tag -new -- tag:new and from:me@example.com

# delete all messages from a spammer:
#notmuch tag +deleted -- tag:new and from:spam@spam.com

# tag all messages from various mailing lists
notmuch tag +geeks -- 'tag:new and to:geeks@lists.example.com'
notmuch tag +nerds -- 'tag:new and to:nerds@lists.example.com'

# tag message from specific recipients
notmuch tag +orange -- 'tag:new and from:potus@whitehouse.gov'
notmuch tag +mw -- 'tag:new and from:word@m-w.com'

# retag all "new" messages "inbox" and "unread"
notmuch tag +inbox +unread -new -- 'tag:new and not folder:sent'

# retag all "new" sent messages "inbox", but not "unread"
notmuch tag +inbox -new -- 'tag:new and folder:sent'

This script depends on new messages being tagged with the new tag. As mentioned above, this was accomplished with the tags=new; line in ~/.notmuch-config.

Notmuch runs the post-new script after it has scanned the maildir for new messages.