Not much of an email review

Posted Mar 26, 2010 7:16 UTC (Fri) by spaetz (guest, #32870)
Parent article: Not much of an email review

Shameless self-plug follows: Notmuch is a primarily a command line tool at the moment. But it is also a shared library offering its functionality to 3rd party clients. Carl Worth expects other mail clients than the default emacs one to integrate notmuch support, and a flurry of scripts and tools is being created surrounding notmuch.

With 3 simple patches that have not made it into the mainline yet (http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.mail.notmuch.general/1822/focus=1836), a libnotmuch.so is build and installed.

I have created python bindings with which it is trivial to make use of notmuch. In order to get a list of all email addresses you've ever send emails to, just do:

 from cnotmuch.notmuch import Database
 msgs = Database().create_query('from:Sebastian@SSpaeth.de').search_messages()
 for msg in msgs: print (msg.get_header('to'))

(install via "sudo easy_install cnotmuch" on decent distributions) Main overview and download links: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/cnotmuch Extensive API documentation is at http://packages.python.org/cnotmuch The issue tracker and source code repo are at http://bitbucket.org/spaetz/cnotmuch

But aside from that, notmuch is really transforming the way, I do emails. I used to be a ferrocious deleter. Besides spam, I haven't deleted a single message in the last few months. Threads tend to become much longer, as they are really a 'discussion place for a topic' and they are easy to pull up again months later and reply to. I seldomly used to reply to months old threads previously. REferences to other emails -very handy for discussions in software development- are much easier, rather than having to search and post a link to some pipermail or gmane web-archive. I press 'ci' in my notmuch emacs window and the current "Message-ID" is copied into the clipboard. People throw mail-IDs around in the notmuch mailing list a lot. Searching those mails (including the thread context) is darn easy.

I think Thunderbird 3 with its use of virtual folders and a mail indexer is finally getting there too, which is good.