LWN: Comments on "A year with Notmuch mail"

A year with Notmuch mail

mathstuf — Sun, 13 Aug 2017 02:41:55 +0000

I run it as a systemd user service. That takes care of hangs nicely at least.

A year with Notmuch mail

lsl — Sat, 12 Aug 2017 23:13:20 +0000

> In older versions of offlineimap, it at least had the good behavior to bail out on ctrl-c, so I could just cancel/restart it on trouble, nowadays it blocks that in some weird attempt to "complete" the sync operation, when there's this extremely commonly known hang behavior.

Recent versions let you force quit using an additional pair of INTs.

A year with Notmuch mail

donio — Wed, 30 Nov 2016 02:01:35 +0000

I have close to a million emails in notmuch as well and found that two new features in recent notmuch and xapain versions have helped to make it even more responsive:

1. The new Glass backend in Xapian 1.4+ speeds up searches and reduces the index size. Switching to this requires re-indexing all the mail which took several hours but was well worth it. (Make sure to backup and restore your tags)

2. Recent notmuch versions can take advantage of the new XAPIAN_DB_RETRY_LOCK feature to wait for the xapian db lock instead of exiting with an error. This got rid of some annoying search failures that sometimes happened when indexing a large batch of new mail. Enabling this just requires a recent enough notmuch compiled against a recent enough libxapian.

A year with Notmuch mail

k8to — Wed, 16 Nov 2016 15:59:39 +0000

It really just doesn't recover from any socket stalls. These can be reproduced with local suspend/resumes, depending upon various factors. It's also possible to get them with spotty networks, typically I see this with mobile IP where I go in and out of network accessibility.

In older versions of offlineimap, it at least had the good behavior to bail out on ctrl-c, so I could just cancel/restart it on trouble, nowadays it blocks that in some weird attempt to "complete" the sync operation, when there's this extremely commonly known hang behavior. So I have to carry patches around to unbreak it.

I didn't know about isync, probably will move to it if it works.

A year with Notmuch mail

mathstuf — Mon, 14 Nov 2016 12:06:13 +0000

What "hang" behavior have you seen with offlineimap? The only thing I've noticed is when the machine loses the network while syncing (e.g., suspending and resuming on a different network).

A year with Notmuch mail

peterhoeg — Mon, 14 Nov 2016 09:33:50 +0000

I can strongly recommend isync over offlineimap for the following reasons:

1) it is MUCH faster

2) it doesn't hang the way that offlineimap does

It was item 2 that drove me to isync - item 1 was simply an unexpected benefit.

A year with Notmuch mail

lmb — Sat, 12 Nov 2016 14:50:00 +0000

I've been using notmuch for a long time - my archive says 2012 -, based on the mutt integration. The indexing/searching has been proven really incredibly useful.

For syncing mails, I currently use offlineimap (I need to evaluate isync), and for outgoing mails msmtp with those queuing scripts. That all works together with mobile clients too.

But, yes, notmuch is awesome!

A year with Notmuch mail

jani — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 20:49:32 +0000

And in case anyone's wondering how all the various pieces fit together, this should give a rough idea: https://notmuchmail.org/ecosystem/

A year with Notmuch mail

sagi — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 18:34:47 +0000

For those of us that do not (yet?) use emacs, I can wholeheartily recommend the alot frontend (https://github.com/pazz/alot). It is really awesome, and much like emacs heavily customizable (through its use of Python). I came from mutt, wanted more of the tagging paradigm than the mutt frontends could provide me (yes, there are multiple, also pretty mature last time I tried) and have not looked back.

The only current notmuch nit I have is MDA integration, e.g. direct delivery from postfix with notmuch insert --keep to avoid having to "poll" using notmuch new. You run into the same locking issues there, worst case communicating back delivery failures. Though I reported a bug and wrote a hacky patch, I have been too lazy to finalize and upstream it.

Afew is worth checking out for automated tags based on e.g. List-Id. It also provides functionality to move mails between folders based on tags, which makes your backup IMAP able to show say just your inbox.

A year with Notmuch mail

jani — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 12:35:01 +0000

Couple of more comments I picked up from the #notmuch channel on freenode (usually a very helpful place btw):

Please send your feature requests and bug reports to the Notmuch mailing list. We track them as email, naturally. (If the only tool you have is a mail client, all problems look like email.)

You could try turning off notmuch-hello-auto-refresh option to speed up notmuch hello.

A year with Notmuch mail

jani — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 09:57:53 +0000

Thanks for writing this. Here are some general and specific comments.

While working on Notmuch, I've perceived everyone has their very own and personal way of managing email. Instead of forcing people into some workflow, we need to give people tools to support their workflows. Mechanism, not policy, if possible. That said, I like to encourage people to try and improve their workflows when switching to Notmuch, because there's so much more to it than your traditional mail client. One of the things I keep repeating is, folders are so 90s, tags are so 00s, saved searches are 10s. Personally, I don't understand the desire to categorize and label and tag a lot of stuff up front, manually or automatically, when in the end you can often just search for it, and have aliases for those queries. Giving up the, in my experience, futile attempts to categorize the firehose of email pointed at my general direction has been very liberating. But, as I said, your mileage *does* vary.

There's another alternative to remote access with the Notmuch Emacs interface. Because the UI uses the Notmuch command-line interface, you can create a wrapper for the notmuch binary that runs it over ssh. So you'll have the Notmuch UI in local Emacs, but have your mail store, Notmuch database and Notmuch CLI on a remote machine. This allows you to e.g. save attachments on the local machine transparently. I use this on a daily basis, and IMHO it really works quite well. Details at https://notmuchmail.org/remoteusage/.

I see the problem with the Notmuch Emacs main screen ("notmuch hello") being slow with plenty of searches. I think most of the developers have moved on to using the "jump menu" where you can access your saved searches using 'j' key binding from basically any Notmuch buffer, without going through hello. You can define the shortcut keys for the jump menu through the customization interface. That said, we should fix this. In the mean time, saved searches also allow you to define your own function to use for counting the number of matches in hello; depending on your elisp-fu, you can do clever things there.

For viewing threads, there are two alternatives, called show view and tree view. The former is a bit Gmail like, with the thread structure done using indentation. You can change the indentation according to your preferences, also to 0 if you like a flat view like Gmail. The latter is similar to mutt, with a thread structure pane and a message pane for showing a single message at a time. You can usually switch between the two by hitting 'Z' or 'S'. See https://notmuchmail.org/screenshots/. Does this help with the thread structure woes?

With Notmuch 0.23 I think you could hack up the mail queue thing. We've switched to using 'notmuch insert' for Fcc, which indexes the outgoing messages, and lets you tag them. So you could build something around that. But, as you know, only the Emacs interface sends mail, and all of that is offloaded to what's available in Emacs already.

A year with Notmuch mail

kzar — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 08:52:36 +0000

Agreed, notmuch has a really great, active and friendly community behind it.

A year with Notmuch mail

mones — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 08:24:33 +0000

Devil is in the detail, but not need to remember everything, of course ;-)

Anyway, these you wrote are interesting points, thanks!

A year with Notmuch mail

neilbrown — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 08:02:39 +0000

You want details from over a year ago??? ☺

The syntax for describing a search is rather cryptic. The pop-up cheat-sheet helped but I have a memory that it didn't always help enough. Possibly it didn't make clear to me how quoting works - i.e. how to search for a string containing a space.

I like saved searches. Claws does provide a recent history in a drop-down which helps, but doesn't help very much.
I also would often like a search to cross-over mailboxes. I don't think Claws supports that.
You can set up a search, then move from mailbox to mailbox and keep the search active which is sometimes nice, and sometimes annoying. I think it is configurable whether the search stays active when you switch mailboxes. Sometimes I want it to, sometimes not. Sometimes when I switch away, then switch back I want the old search to still be active, sometimes not.

If the window which listed all mailboxes included some widget which meant "select this and apply the current search", and if you selected anywhere else it would select the mailbox without the current search, that might have felt easier to work with.

A year with Notmuch mail

mones — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 07:02:59 +0000

Just curious, what did you miss from Claws Mail search interface?

A year with Notmuch mail

drag — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 02:36:59 +0000

non-destructive mail folders. :)

That's what I would like to see.

A IMAP server were the folders are logically constructed based on notmuch queries. No editing or moving or copying around of the original emails at all.

notmuch and mail.runner

tridge — Wed, 09 Nov 2016 22:13:29 +0000

I also use notmuch, with the emacs interface. I'm pretty happy with it.
I use it with mail.runner, a shell script wrapper around rsync for grabbing mail efficiently over ssh
https://github.com/tridge/junkcode/blob/master/mail.runner

A year with Notmuch mail

adirat — Wed, 09 Nov 2016 20:31:48 +0000

I have to say I found the notmuch community one of the most pleasant, easy to work with and contribute to. I really wish all maintainers were like these guys. Great software, great people.

bonus: integration with org-mode

tnoo — Wed, 09 Nov 2016 20:24:21 +0000

One of the main advantages of notmuch, except for the tagging and very fast search, is the integration into org-mode. Capturing a TODO item keeps a link to the message in the task list, so there is the context in the diary and the todo list (e.g. details of invitations, reqests etc.)

As for asynchronous mail delivery: since notmuch does not deliver email, you could use something like msmtp, and the scripts to queue mail delivery.

A year with Notmuch mail

josh — Wed, 09 Nov 2016 20:03:36 +0000

In terms of remote access, I'd love to see an IMAP server with fully integrated notmuch indexing, such that you can run notmuch queries and search folders via IMAP, from a normal IMAP client.