notmuch/man/man1/notmuch.1

.\" notmuch - Not much of an email program, (just index, search and tagging)
.\"
.\" Copyright © 2009 Carl Worth
.\"
.\" Notmuch is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
.\" it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
.\" the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
.\" (at your option) any later version.
.\"
.\" Notmuch is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
.\" but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
.\" MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
.\" GNU General Public License for more details.
.\"
.\" You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
.\" along with this program.  If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ .
.\"
.\" Author: Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org>
.TH NOTMUCH 1 2013-01-18 "Notmuch 0.15"
.SH NAME
notmuch \- thread-based email index, search, and tagging
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B notmuch
.RI "[" option " ...] " command  " [" arg " ...]"
.SH DESCRIPTION
Notmuch is a command-line based program for indexing, searching,
reading, and tagging large collections of email messages.

This page describes how to get started using notmuch from the command
line, and gives a brief overview of the commands available. For more
information on e.g.
.B notmuch show
consult the \fBnotmuch-show\fR(1) man page, also accessible via
.B notmuch help show

The quickest way to get started with Notmuch is to simply invoke the
.B notmuch
command with no arguments, which will interactively guide you through
the process of indexing your mail.
.SH NOTE
While the command-line program
.B notmuch
provides powerful functionality, it does not provide the most
convenient interface for that functionality. More sophisticated
interfaces are expected to be built on top of either the command-line
interface, or more likely, on top of the notmuch library
interface. See http://notmuchmail.org for more about alternate
interfaces to notmuch. The emacs-based interface to notmuch (available under
.B emacs/
in the Notmuch source distribution) is probably the most widely used at
this time.

.SH OPTIONS

Supported global options for
.B notmuch
include

.RS 4
.TP 4
.B \-\-help

Print a synopsis of available commands and exit.
.RE

.RS 4
.TP 4
.B \-\-version

Print the installed version of notmuch, and exit.
.RE

.SH COMMANDS


.SS SETUP

The
.B notmuch setup
command is used to configure Notmuch for first use, (or to reconfigure
it later).

The setup command will prompt for your full name, your primary email
address, any alternate email addresses you use, and the directory
containing your email archives. Your answers will be written to a
configuration file in ${NOTMUCH_CONFIG} (if set) or
${HOME}/.notmuch-config . This configuration file will be created with
descriptive comments, making it easy to edit by hand later to change the
configuration. Or you can run
.B "notmuch setup"
again to change the configuration.

The mail directory you specify can contain any number of
sub-directories and should primarily contain only files with individual
email messages (eg. maildir or mh archives are perfect). If there are
other, non-email files (such as indexes maintained by other email
programs) then notmuch will do its best to detect those and ignore
them.

Mail storage that uses mbox format, (where one mbox file contains many
messages), will not work with notmuch. If that's how your mail is
currently stored, it is recommended you first convert it to maildir
format with a utility such as mb2md before running
.B "notmuch setup" .

Invoking
.B notmuch
with no command argument will run
.B setup
if the setup command has not previously been completed.
.RE

.SS OTHER COMMANDS

Several of the notmuch commands accept search terms with a common
syntax. See \fNnotmuch-search-terms\fR(7)
for more details on the supported syntax.

The
.BR search ", " show " and " count
commands are used to query the email database.

The
.B reply
command is useful for preparing a template for an email reply.

The
.B tag
command is the only command available for manipulating database
contents.


The
.BR dump " and " restore
commands can be used to create a textual dump of email tags for backup
purposes, and to restore from that dump.

The
.B config
command can be used to get or set settings int the notmuch
configuration file.

.SH ENVIRONMENT
The following environment variables can be used to control the
behavior of notmuch.
.TP
.B NOTMUCH_CONFIG
Specifies the location of the notmuch configuration file. Notmuch will
use ${HOME}/.notmuch\-config if this variable is not set.
.SH SEE ALSO

\fBnotmuch-config\fR(1), \fBnotmuch-count\fR(1),
\fBnotmuch-dump\fR(1), \fBnotmuch-hooks\fR(5), \fBnotmuch-new\fR(1),
\fBnotmuch-reply\fR(1), \fBnotmuch-restore\fR(1),
\fBnotmuch-search\fR(1), \fBnotmuch-search-terms\fR(7),
\fBnotmuch-show\fR(1), \fBnotmuch-tag\fR(1)


The notmuch website:
.B http://notmuchmail.org
.SH CONTACT
Feel free to send questions, comments, or kudos to the notmuch mailing
list <notmuch@notmuchmail.org> . Subscription is not required before
posting, but is available from the notmuchmail.org website.

Real-time interaction with the Notmuch community is available via IRC
(server: irc.freenode.net, channel: #notmuch).