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Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 20:32:22 +0200
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 <CA+Tk8fycS4kmBRABRS4vFQLb3v0-ajcLZwPOwwEf98yvObgpwA@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Exporting a single email as JSON
From: Ciprian Dorin Craciun <ciprian.craciun@gmail.com>
To: notmuch@notmuchmail.org
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    Hello all!

    Quick question: why isn't it reasonable to export a **single**
email in JSON format (by using the `show` sub-command)? (I mean I
understand that in order to be able to correctly parse the output we
need only one "object" (i.e. a list of threads, containing a list of
emails, etc.). But there might be use cases in which we need a
"twist".)

    My current use case is: I want to import the JSON representation
of my emails in CouchDB, each email in a single document. And as I
already have my emails indexed with Notmuch, I hopped that -- with the
help of some Bash-fu and Curl -- it would have been trivial to
instruct notmuch to export all emails matching a certain criteria as
JSON...

    What would have been perfect in this case: each matching email
(with or without the `--entire-thread` flag) should be exported as a
single JSON object on a single line, thus each different email on a
single line. Thus I could have easily used `notmuch show
--output=json-line -- {criteria} | xargs -L 1 -- curl
{couchdb-magic}`.)

    For now I'll pre-process the current output in JavaScript.

    Thanks,
    Ciprian.