Notmuch -- Just an email system

If you've been looking for a fast, global-search and tag-based email system to use within your text editor or in a terminal...

If you're the kind of person that gets excited about being able to write shell scripts for exploring and manipulating your email...

If you're a developer of an existing email program and would love a good library interface for fast, global search with support for arbitrary tags...

If you want the convenience of fast, reliable search of all your email, but don't want to give a 3rd-party access to your email...

Then notmuch may be exactly what you've been looking for.

Why is it named Notmuch?

"Not much mail" is what Notmuch thinks about your email collection. Even if you receive 12000 messages per month or have on the order of millions of messages that you've been saving for decades. Regardless, Notmuch will be able to quickly search all of it. It's just plain not much mail.

"Not much mail" is also what you should have in your inbox at any time. Notmuch gives you what you need, (tags and fast search), so that you can keep your inbox tamed and focus on what really matters in your life, (which is surely not email).

Notmuch is an answer to Sup. Sup is a very good email program written by William Morgan (and others) and is the direct inspiration for Notmuch. Notmuch began as an effort to rewrite performance-critical pieces of Sup in C rather than Ruby. From there, it grew into a separate project. One significant contribution Notmuch makes compared to Sup is the separation of the indexer/searcher from the user interface. (Notmuch provides a library interface so that its indexing/searching/tagging features can be integrated into any email program.)

Notmuch is not much of an email program. It doesn't receive messages (no POP or IMAP support). It doesn't send messages (no mail composer, no network code at all). And for what it does do (email search) that work is provided by an external library, Xapian. So if Notmuch provides no user interface and Xapian does all the heavy lifting, then what's left here? Not much.

News

Notmuch news (mostly release notes and changes).

Getting Started

To get started with Notmuch, just run "notmuch" at the command line. This command will walk you through initial setup, including specifying the location of your mail store and how to start the initial indexing.

For a little more detailed guide, see Getting Started with Notmuch.

Email Clients and Front Ends

Notmuch ships with a powerful set of command-line tools, an email client for Emacs, another client for vim, and a Mutt integration script.

There are also many other email clients, frontends and tools based on Notmuch.

Documentation

Apart from the wiki, help is available via email and on IRC (see below). Join the mailing list. Read the archives. Ask questions.

Screenshots

Obtaining Notmuch

Notmuch source releases are available as source tar balls.

Notmuch is packaged for at least the following operating systems and distributions:

Contact: Email & IRC

Comments? Please feel free to email the notmuch mailing list: notmuch@notmuchmail.org (subscription is not required, but you can also subscribe to the notmuch mailing list). You can also browse the online list archives, read them as a web forum (nabble), or download an mbox file of the entire mailing-list (the mbox file ends at 2020-07-01; we'll offer a more up-to-date full-list archive soon).

The mb2md utility can be used to convert the archives to maildir format which is convenient for reading the archives within notmuch itself.

If you prefer real-time chat, there is often someone on the #notmuch@irc.freenode.net IRC channel. Don't ask if you can ask a question, just ask, and please wait for an answer, we might not be in your timezone.

Troubleshooting, Reporting Bugs and Feature Requests

Please send bug reports and feature requests to the Notmuch mailing list notmuch@notmuchmail.org.

For hints about troubleshooting and bug reporting see bugs.

Please see the nmbug status page for lists of known bugs and feature requests.

Development and Contributing

All of the code for Notmuch is available as free software released under the GNU GPL version 3. The latest versions can be checked out via git with this command:

git clone https://git.notmuchmail.org/git/notmuch

You can browse the Notmuch code history online. The Notmuch OpenHub project page has a nice summary of the codebase and activity.

Continuous integration build and test suite status:

Contributions, such as patches, to Notmuch are most welcome. Please refer to the guide to contributing.

Website

This website is a wiki, maintained using ikiwiki. Here are instructions on how to edit the wiki. The wiki contents are mostly dual licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0 and GPLv3+.