The notmuch mail client [LWN.net]

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 17, 2009 23:28 UTC (Tue) by petegn (guest, #847) [Link] (2 responses)

Yes Kmail is perfect i have used it for ages with no problems at all dunno about this Imap stuff never tried it dont need it , Then there is what is it Evolution on Gnome donu use gnome so not too sure .

I think what people are actually trying to say without actually saying as much is they only know about outlook and cant find outlook (scuse me whilst i barf ) for Linux boy am i glad of that Outlook Distress is just that Distressing..

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 18, 2009 2:18 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (1 responses)

Uh... that's Keith Packard you're talking about. Look him up.

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 19, 2009 5:54 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link]

The arrogance of rank ignorance is petegn's special gift to the world.

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 18, 2009 1:09 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (6 responses)

kmail and thunderbird both choke when faced with sufficiently large
amounts of email. xapian doesn't. (Oh, and 'why emacs' is simple: if you
use it as your text editor anyway, it makes for a bloody good environment
to implement the whole UI in. This is not an isolated belief: rmail
(historical interest only), VM, Mew, and Gnus attest that this is an itch
that a lot of people like to scratch. notmuch looks seriously nice to me,
because the one thing that's clumsy and slow in Gnus is searching.)

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 18, 2009 2:32 UTC (Wed) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (5 responses)

Define "sufficiently large"?

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 18, 2009 2:40 UTC (Wed) by Darkmere (subscriber, #53695) [Link] (4 responses)

1.45 Million emails at least cause it to churn a bit. And that amount isn't really usable on a normal filesystem with maildir unless you start using year/month/ sorting for various lists.

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 18, 2009 9:57 UTC (Wed) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (3 responses)

Makes sense, you need a database for that many emails I suppose. Something like Akonadi I would say :D

Would certainly be an option for the notmuch mail client...

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 18, 2009 16:42 UTC (Wed) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link] (2 responses)

I think I've heard of this akonadi. That's the thing that isn't actually a
DB, but backends to one, right? Iirc, it's the cause of some ire in Debian
because the package depends on the mysql-server package, meaning any KDE
desktop user needs an installed and configured mysql server on their
machine.

Anyway, I think xapian is more fit-for-purpose for this problem than a
generic relational database.

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 18, 2009 17:25 UTC (Wed) by wstephenson (guest, #14795) [Link] (1 responses)

That's just a packaging mistake then. What are these debian cowboys like? </joke>.

Contrary to what you've heard Akonadi doesn't require a configured mysql server running on the machine. It spawns a per-session instance of mysql running a custom config that is tweaked, minimal and secure. We started with mysql-embedded but after running into weird problems with it, went for the standalone process - it doesn't create significantly more overhead and we think we have the process management sorted.

You do still have to have an installed mysql though. Postgresql and sqlite support are being worked on, but we've run into a lot of problems with heavily multithreaded access to sqlite.

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 25, 2009 23:12 UTC (Wed) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

> we've run into a lot of problems with heavily multithreaded access to sqlite.

Try delegating writes to a dedicated thread (per db handle) and allowing only read access from other threads.

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 18, 2009 9:10 UTC (Wed) by dmk (guest, #50141) [Link] (2 responses)

to adress the 'kmail and thunderbird' comment:

there's a difference between using mail with 0-400 msgs per day and using mail with >400 msgs per day.

the former is the category where the mainstream emailagents are ok. but for larger number of mails there are are performance problems and mail-handling-inefficencies that criple one's ability to handle mail fast. (these inefficiencies are mostly by design and not bugs)

i for one use claws-mail, but am in the <400msgs per day category.

cheers,
dmk

p.s.: and plz! don't mention outlook, because most people here don't even know what it looks like.

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 18, 2009 9:12 UTC (Wed) by dmk (guest, #50141) [Link]

hm... make that 0-100msgs probably... because at that point thunderbird starts to hurt already pretty much...

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 18, 2009 13:11 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

I'm getting a few thousand mails a day in three accounts -- about half of
them spam, the rest ordinary mail and a lot of mailing list mails. KMail
handles that just fine, including the spam filtering.

But I'm using pop: not sure whether imap would would work as well. My
archives aren't that big though, I throw away a lot of mailing list mail
after having skimmed it, and my archives don't go back to 1993 anymore
after a stupid crash.

And I'm going to try mailody soon, which uses Akonadi and is designed for
handling large amounts of mail over imap.

The notmuch mail system

Posted Nov 18, 2009 9:59 UTC (Wed) by cworth (subscriber, #27653) [Link] (1 responses)

Hi Alex,

You've got Keith's take on our project so far. Let me try to add a bit
of my own.

First, I like to call this project the "notmuch mail system" rather
than the "notmuch mail client". Our emacs client is just one (tiny)
piece of the system and I know that not everybody will want that,
(probably most people won't).

But a more interesting thing that Notmuch has is a really nice, clean
C library interface to all of the interesting pieces, (mail indexing,
fast search, tagging, etc.), thanks to Xapian of course.

So I would be quite happy if the developers of existing graphical
email clients took a look at Notmuch from the point of view of
integrating with the library for search. Personally, I've got about
600 thousand emails in my collection and I've yet to find a graphical
client which can search even a small fraction of that very quickly.

But with Notmuch, even the largest searches can return results almost
instantly, and that's really nice.

Then again, if nobody uses it but me, then I'll still be happy. :-)

-Carl

The notmuch mail system

Posted Nov 18, 2009 22:45 UTC (Wed) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link]

And I thought I have a lot of mails on my system...

I checked, and currently I have around 85000 mails here, with the biggest
folder containing 17000 mails.
Until now there are absolutely no performance issues when using kmail for
this amount of mails.

Alex