Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 11:34:43 +0200
From: Vladimir Marek <Vladimir.Marek@Oracle.COM>
To: notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Subject: Possible addtions to notmuch new ?
Message-ID: <20130812093443.GB16684@virt.cz.oracle.com>
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Hi,

My mail setup is a directory containing several subdirectories each
subdirectory corresponds to one real mail account I am using. Each mail
account is synchronized differently - I am using offlineimap, fetchmeail
or even synthetically created emails (I am writing very simple jabber<->
mail gate).Every now and then I am running 'notmuch new' to discover new
emails and make them available in my MUA.

That works pretty well, but has some disadvantages too
 - notmuch new takes very long time (30s) during which the notmuch
   database seems to be locked for any other updates from my MUA
 - notmuch new takes long time because it always processes my archive
   dir containing many files. That's mostly un-necessary as typically
   there's no new mail delivered
 - I don't have the possibility of passing new mails through procmail.
   That would be useful for example for changing cron mail subjects,
   putting related automated mails into threads (bugzilla, etc.).


I was thinking that if we could split the new mail discovery from
it's processing, it would solve the disadvantages I'm facing. Something
like

notmuch new --verbose --dry-run [dir] | my_filter | notmuch insert -

It would work
 - --dry-run would not lock and change the database
 - --verbose would print the changes to stdout/stderr. Something like:

new mail/file.1
new mail/file.2
deleted mail/file.3
renamed mail/file.4 mail/file.5
...

[dir] would limit the scope of 'notmuch' new search to dir and it's
subdirectories. Alternatively we could have set of include or exclude
rules similarly to rsync (for example), but [dir] is easier to
implement.

'my_filter' would be my script which could change the contents of emails
before they are inserted into notmuch database.

Notmuch insert would be able to not only add new mails, but also remove
old ones or note that the file was renamed.

How would this sound?

I'm not saying I would implement this, I'm rather curious where would
you like to see notmuch in the future.

Cheers
-- 
	Vlad