Notmuch mail with afew tags and the alot user interface. September 15, 2012

Transcription

1 Notmuch mail with afew tags and the alot user interface Software Freedom Day 2012 Hamburg September 15, 2012 c Justus Winter This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. (hg clone)

2

3

4 1 Introduction Origins Who is who 2 Concepts and killer features Initial tagging Inbox Zero Killing mail threads afews default filter chain alots UI and configuration Using the notmuch binary

5 Introduction Origins Once upon a time... MUA interfaces haven t changed much in the last few years some of them group threads, some of them support sorting mails in folders, some of them support adding a fixed set of tags to mails, until gmail came around and brought shiny new features including adding arbitrary tags (labels in gmail-speak) to messages, advanced search features and persistent searches (aka smart folders). sup was created to bring those nifty features to those with a cloud aversion

6 Introduction Who is who What is sup? sup [MtSc08] is... a gmail-styled mutt-killer written in Ruby. a curses based mutt style MUA. allows one to add arbitrary tags to any mail and to do complex search queries over ones mails. using the xapian database engine. development seems to have stalled, the latest version is released on with little activity in the version control system.

7 Introduction Who is who What is notmuch? notmuch [Wtnc09] is... a reimplementation of the core of the sup MUA written in c. a library for building powerful MUAs the UNIX way: Do one thing and do it well. busy indexing your mail, it doesn t know POP, IMAP or SMTP and has no user interface (though there are many available, e.g. notmuch-{emacs,vi}, patches for mutt and alot). using the xapian database engine like sup. not impressed by your mail collection: That s just not much mail!

8 Introduction Who is who What is alot? alot [Tot11] is... a mail user agent. written in python. highly customize-able. using the curses widget library urwid. using the awesome notmuch library as backend. just a frontend, it doesn t know POP, IMAP or SMTP. better than you at everything [Bro10].

9 Introduction Who is who What is afew? afew [Win11] is... tags incoming messages based on a customize-able filter chain. provides a powerful default filter chain. an universal initial tagging solution replacing hand-written alternatives 1 (they are often just shell scripts). configured with your mail policy it is your personal secretary. 1 See

10 Introduction Who is who Wait, what?!? So we got the alot frontend and notmuch as backend, neither of which can receive or deliver mail and there s this strange afew thingy. I thought this talk is about some awesome mail user agent making ones life simpler? Ok, let s recap! This is my mail stack: program doing what alternatives offlineimap fetching mail via IMAP any MDA notmuch indexing your mails afew tagging incoming mails custom tagging scripts alot MUA based on notmuch any notmuch frontend exim sending mails any MTA

11 Concepts and killer features Initial tagging A new message arrives offlineimap runs and fetches one new message. offlineimap executes its post-sync hook notmuch new && afew tag new. notmuch scans your maildir and adds the new message to the index and tags it with the tags specified in the notmuch config ( new ). afew searches for all mails tagged new and applies the configured policy. The last filter in the chain removes the new tag and adds the inbox tag.

12 Concepts and killer features Inbox Zero Going over new mail alots default view is tag:inbox AND NOT tag:killed, so the new mail will pop up there. notmuch suggests strongly to employ Manns Inbox Zero [Man06] concept, read your mail and get it out of your sight. There are two ways to do that either remove the inbox tag or add the killed tag. Note that neither operation deletes any mail. In fact, no mail is ever deleted in notmuch setups.

13 Concepts and killer features Killing mail threads Killing mail threads The killed tag reimplements a feature that has been present in the nntp client rn (and is in fact present in Thunderbird, though only for news and not for mail). Whenever a follow up is received for a thread that has been tagged killed it won t be tagged inbox. This is in fact a killer feature allowing one to cope with large amounts of mail with a low signal to noise ratio (think developer mailing lists).

14 Concepts and killer features afews default filter chain afews default filter chain 1 Add spam tag if flagged by spamassassin. 2 Classify messages using bayesian filtering with the dbacl package. 3 Implements killing of message threads. 4 Tags mails based on list id headers. 5 Archives mails sent by one of your addresses. 6 Catch all filter that adds the inbox tag to all non spam messages. # This is the default # filter chain [SpamFilter] [ClassifyingFilter] [KillThreadsFilter] [ListMailsFilter] [ArchiveSentMailsFilter] [Incivility] Live demo!!elfel1 (cross your fingers ;)

15 Concepts and killer features alots UI and configuration alots UI and configuration alot can be amazingly customized. And it s easy ;) It is theme-able (the latest version includes a sup theme ;). Every command can be bound to arbitrary keys and key sequences. It is very hack-able since it is written in python (and quite nicely and the source is thoroughly documented 2 ). And it is fast. Demo! 2

16 Concepts and killer features Using the notmuch binary Using the notmuch binary notmuch includes a binary called notmuch that makes manipulating mails a breeze. You can easily show mails and threads, search mails and threads, and manipulate tags. It has a very nice man page based documentation. It outputs human readable text and json. It actually covers most of libnotmuchs API. libnotmuch includes bindings for python (3k too), golang and ruby. Demo!

17 Appendix Questions? Questions? <shameless plug>i am looking for a job.</shameless plug>

18 Appendix Extra: Programming libnotmuch Extra: Programming libnotmuch Programming libnotmuch is easy, especially in python 3 ;). import os import notmuch with notmuch.database(os.path.expanduser( ~/Maildir )) as db: for message in db.create_query( from:marvin )\.search_messages(): print(message, str(message.get_tags()), message.format_message_as_text()) break 3

19 Appendix References Allie Brosh. The Alot is Better Than You at Everything. April Merlin Mann. Inbox zero - your , your attention, and your life William Morgan and the Sup contributors. Sup Patrick Totzke. commandline mua using notmuch and urwid

20 Appendix References Justus Winter. afew is an initial tagging script for notmuch mail Carl Worth and the notmuch contributors. notmuch