From: Michal Sojka <sojkam1@fel.cvut.cz>
To: Stephen Paul Weber <singpolyma@singpolyma.net>, notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Subject: Re: A problem and a suggestion
In-Reply-To: <20100806170410.GA1526@singpolyma-svelti>
References: <20100806170410.GA1526@singpolyma-svelti>
User-Agent: Notmuch/0.3.1-80-g86b7c46 (http://notmuchmail.org) Emacs/23.2.1
	(x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
Date: Sun, 08 Aug 2010 15:52:49 +0200
Message-ID: <87d3ttfbym.fsf@steelpick.2x.cz>
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Precedence: list

On Fri, 06 Aug 2010, Stephen Paul Weber wrote:
> Anyway.  I installed notmuch a few days ago (0.1), ran the setup, ran
> notmuch new and i said it found 30000+ files, but no new mail?  No searches
> return any results.  What am I doing wrong?

Hi Stephen,

I guess you have your mails in a wrong fomrat. Do you see "Note:
Ignoring non-mail file" messages during notmuch new? You may also try
notmuch new --verbose.

> How does notmuch determine which mail is "new" anyway? 

New is a message found on your disk with a message-id not stored in
notmuch database.

> I gather by other threads on the list archives that editing a message
> does not make it "new"? So notmuch just gets whatever the first
> version of the message contents it sees is? And if the file gets
> renamed (by mutt for example, when marked as read) the filename stored
> by notmuch would then be wrong?

Yes. AFAIK notmuch assumes that messages are immutable and when you edit
the message, notmuch doesn't re-index it. Notmuch new code is able to
detect renames so if you rename the file, the filename in the database
is wrong only until you run notmuch new again.

> I'd also like to suggest that notmuch index the Keywords header, since that
> is a header meant exactly for being indexed by search engines and for
> searching on.  I use it quite a bit.

This is an often requested feature - everyone has its favorite header
which he wants to index. Indexing custom headers is planned for some
future release, but no code has appeared yet.

> This would be especially useful if notmuch re-indexed a message when I
> edit this header.

I'm not sure how hard it would be to implement this and what would be
the performance implications. You should store modification time of a
message in the database and re-index the file when the mtime on disk in
newer than in the database.
> 
> Actually, how hard would it be to allow notmuch to be configured to index
> any custom header?

Not much :-)

-Michal