Tag Archives: notmuch

How I do email (at work)

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Recently, I blogged on my home email setup and in that post, I hinted that my work setup was rather different. I have entirely separate computing devices for work and personal, a setup I strongly recommend. This also lets me “go home” from work even when working from home, I use a different physical machine!

Since I work for IBM I have (at least) two email accounts for work: a Lotus Notes one and a internet standards compliant one. It’s “easy” enough to get the Notes one to forward to the standards compliant one, from which I can just use fetchmail or similar to pull down mail.

I run mail through a rather simple procmail script: it de-mangles some URL mangling that can happen in the current IBM email infrastructure, runs things through SpamAssassin and deliver to a date based Maildir (or one giant pile for spam).

My ~/.procmailrc looks something like this:

LOGFILE=$HOME/mail_log
LOGABSTRACT=yes

DATE=`date +"%Y%m"`
MAILDIR=Maildir/INBOX
DEFAULT=$DATE/

:0fw
| magic_script_to_unmangle_things

:0fw
| spamc

:0
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
$HOME/Maildir/junkmail/incoming/

I use tail -f mail_log as a really dumb kind of biff replacement.

Now, what do I read and write mail with? Notmuch! It is the only thing that even comes close to being able to deal with a decent flow of mail. I have a couple of saved searches just to track how much mail I pull in a day/week. Today (on Monday), it says 442 today and 10,403 over the past week.

For the most part, my workflow is kind of INBOX-ZERO like, except that I currently view victory as INBOX 2000. Most mail does go into my INBOX, the notable exceptions are two main mailing lists I’m subscribed to mostly as FYI and to search/find things when needed. Those are the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) and the buildroot mailing list. Why notmuch rather than just searching the web for mailing list archives? Notmuch can return the result of a query in less time it takes light to get to and from the United States in ideal conditions.

For work, I don’t sync my mail anywhere. It’s just on my laptop. Not having it on my phone is a feature. I have a notmuch post-new hook that does some initial tagging of mail, and as such I have this in my ~/.notmuch-config:

[new]
tags=new;

My post-new hook looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

# immediately archive all messages from "me"
notmuch tag -new -- tag:new and from:stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com

# tag all message from lists
notmuch tag +devicetree +list -- tag:new and to:devicetree@vger.kernel.org
notmuch tag +inbox +unread -new -- tag:new and tag:devicetree and to:stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com
notmuch tag +listinbox +unread +list -new -- tag:new and tag:devicetree and not to:stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com

notmuch tag +linuxppc +list -- tag:new and to:linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org
notmuch tag +linuxppc +list -- tag:new and cc:linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org
notmuch tag +inbox +unread -new -- tag:new and tag:linuxppc
notmuch tag +openbmc +list -- tag:new and to:openbmc@lists.ozlabs.org
notmuch tag +inbox +unread -new -- tag:new and tag:openbmc

notmuch tag +lkml +list -- tag:new and to:linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
notmuch tag +inbox +unread -new -- tag:new and tag:lkml and to:stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com
notmuch tag +listinbox +unread -new -- tag:new and tag:lkml and not tag:linuxppc and not to:stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com

notmuch tag +qemuppc +list -- tag:new and to:qemu-ppc@nongnu.org
notmuch tag +inbox +unread -new -- tag:new and tag:qemuppc and to:stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com
notmuch tag +listinbox +unread -new -- tag:new and tag:qemuppc and not to:stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com

notmuch tag +qemu +list -- tag:new and to:qemu-devel@nongnu.org
notmuch tag +inbox +unread -new -- tag:new and tag:qemu and to:stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com
notmuch tag +listinbox +unread -new -- tag:new and tag:qemu and not to:stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com

notmuch tag +buildroot +list -- tag:new and to:buildroot@buildroot.org
notmuch tag +buildroot +list -- tag:new and to:buildroot@busybox.net
notmuch tag +buildroot +list -- tag:newa nd to:buildroot@uclibc.org
notmuch tag +inbox +unread -new -- tag:new and tag:buildroot and to:stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com
notmuch tag +listinbox +unread -new -- tag:new and tag:buildroot and not to:stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com

notmuch tag +ibmbugzilla -- tag:new and from:bugzilla@us.ibm.com

# finally, retag all "new" messages "inbox" and "unread"
notmuch tag +inbox +unread -new -- tag:new

This leaves me with both an inbox and a listinbox. I do not look at the overwhelming majority of mail that hits the listinbox – It’s mostly for following up on individual things. If I started to need to care more about specific topics, I’d probably add something in there for them so I could easily find them.

My notmuch emacs setup has a bunch of saved searches, so my notmuch-hello screen looks something like this:

This gets me a bit of a state-of-the-world-of-email-to-look-at view for the day. I’ll often have meetings first thing in the morning that may reference email I haven’t looked at yet, and this generally lets me quickly find mail related to the problems of the day and start being productive.

How I do email (at home)

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I thought I might write something up on how I’ve been doing email both at home and at work. I very much on purpose keep the two completely separate, and have slightly different use cases for both of them.

For work, I do not want mail on my phone. For personal mail, it turns out I do want this on my phone, which is currently an Android phone. Since my work and personal email is very separate, the volume of mail is really, really different. Personal mail is maybe a couple of dozen a day at most. Work is… orders of magnitude more.

Considering I generally prefer free software to non-free software, K9 Mail is the way I go on my phone. I have it set up to point at the IMAP and SMTP servers of my mail provider (FastMail). I also have a google account, and the gmail app works fine for the few bits of mail that go there instead of my regular account.

For my mail accounts, I do an INBOX ZERO like approach (in reality, I’m pretty much nowhere near zero, but today I learned I’m a lot closer than many colleagues). This means I read / respond / do / ignore mail and then move it to an ARCHIVE folder. K9 and Gmail both have the ability to do this easily, so it works well.

Additionally though, I don’t want to care about limits on storage (i.e. expire mail from the server after X days), nor do I want to rely on “the cloud” to be the only copy of things. I also don’t want to have to upload any of past mail I may be keeping around. I also generally prefer to use notmuch as a mail client on a computer.

For those not familiar with notmuch, it does tags on mail in Maildir, is extremely fast and can actually cope with a quantity of mail. It also has this “archive”/INBOX ZERO workflow which I like.

In order to get mail from FastMail and Gmail onto a machine, I use offlineimap. An important thing to do is to set “status_backend = sqlite” for each Account. It turns out I first hacked on sqlite for offlineimap status a bit over ten years ago – time flies. For each Account I also set presynchook = ~/Maildir/maildir-notmuch-presync (below) and a postsynchook = notmuch new. The presynchook is run before we sync, and its job is to move files around based on the tags in notmuch and the postsynchook lets notmuch catch any new mail that’s been fetched.

My maildir-notmuch-presync hook script is:

#!/bin/bash
notmuch search --output=files not tag:inbox and folder:fastmail/INBOX|xargs -I'{}' mv '{}' "$HOME/Maildir/INBOX/fastmail/Archive/cur/"

notmuch search --output=files folder:fastmail/INBOX and tag:spam |xargs -I'{}' mv '{}' "$HOME/Maildir/INBOX/fastmail/Spam/cur/"
ARCHIVE_DIR=$HOME/Maildir/INBOX/`date +"%Y%m"`/cur/
mkdir -p $ARCHIVE_DIR
notmuch search --output=files folder:fastmail/Archive and date:..90d and not tag:flagged | xargs -I'{}' mv '{}' "$ARCHIVE_DIR"

# Gmail
notmuch search --output=files not tag:inbox and folder:gmail/INBOX|grep 'INBOX/gmail/INBOX/' | xargs -I'{}' rm '{}'
notmuch search --output=files folder:gmail/INBOX and tag:spam |xargs -I'{}' mv '{}' "$HOME/Maildir/INBOX/gmail/[Gmail].Spam/cur/"

So This keeps 90 days of mail on the fastmail server, and archives older mail off into month based archive dirs. This is simply to keep directory sizes not too large, you could put everything in one directory… but at some point that gets a bit silly.

I don’t think this is all the most optimal setup I could have, but it does let me read and answer mail on my phone and desktop (as well as use a web client if I want to). There is a bit of needless copying of messages by offlineimap under certain circumstances, but I don’t get enough personal mail for it to be a problem.

Without notmuch, I would simply delete your email

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I have been using notmuch (http://notmuchmail.org/) as my email client for quite a while now. It’s fast. I don’t mean that everything happens instantly (some actions do take a bit longer than ideally they would), but with the quantity of mail I (and others) throw at it? Beats everything else I’ve ever tried.

I keep seeing people complain about not being able to keep up with various email loads and I am convinced it is because their mail client sucks.

I hear people go on about mutt…. well, I stopped using mutt when it would take two minutes to open some of my mail folders.

I hear some people talk about Evolution…. well, I stopped using Evolution when I realized that when it was rebuilding its index, I couldn’t use my mail client for at least twenty minutes.

Gmail…. well, maybe. Except that I don’t want all my mail to be sitting on google servers, I want to be able to work disconnected and the amount of time it would take to upload my existing mail makes it a non-starter (especially from the arse end of the internet – Australia). I also do not want email on my phone.

My current problem with notmuch? It just uses Maildir…. and this isn’t the most efficient for mail that never changes, some kind of archive format that is compressed would be great. Indeed, I started looking into this ages ago, but just haven’t had the spare cycles to complete it (and getting SSDs everywhere has not helped with the motivation).

Coming back from vacation, my mailbox had about 4,700 messages sitting in it. I’ve been able to get through just about all of them without blindly deleting mail. This is largely due to the great UI of notmuch for being able to quickly look at threads and then mark as read, quickly progressing to the next message. I can tag mail for action, I can very quickly search for email on an urgent topic (and find it) and generally get on with the business of getting things done rather than using an email program.