NOTMUCH(1)						      General Commands Manual							NOTMUCH(1)

NAME

       notmuch - thread-based email index, search, and tagging

SYNOPSIS

       notmuch command [args ...]

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.  notmuch show consult the notmuch-show(1) man page, also accessible via notmuch help show

       The quickest way to get started with Notmuch is to simply invoke the notmuch command with no arguments, which will interactively guide  you
       through the process of indexing your mail.

NOTE

       While  the  command-line  program notmuch provides powerful functionality, it does not provide the most convenient interface for that func-
       tionality. 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 not-
       much (available under emacs/ in the Notmuch source distribution) is probably the most widely used at this time.

COMMANDS

   SETUP
       The 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 con-
       taining	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 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 mes-
       sages (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 notmuch setup .

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

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

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

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

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

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

ENVIRONMENT

       The following environment variables can be used to control the behavior of notmuch.

       NOTMUCH_CONFIG
	      Specifies the location of the notmuch configuration file. Notmuch will use ${HOME}/.notmuch-config if this variable is not set.

SEE ALSO

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

       The notmuch website: http://notmuchmail.org

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).

Notmuch 0.13.2							    2012-06-01								NOTMUCH(1)