TITLE: Using notmuch to search email in Mutt
DATE: 2019-01-05
AUTHOR: John L. Godlee
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I found that the inbuilt search facility in my email client, Mutt, 
was not all that powerful, or at least I didn't have the 
inclination to learn its ways. But I already know how to use 
notmuch for indexing and searching email, so I wanted to 
incorporate it into my Mutt workflow.

I made sure I had notmuch on my computer:

    brew install notmuch

NeoMutt is meant to come with notmuch support out of the box, so I 
didn't need to apply the notmuch-mutt patch. I did use this 
mutt-notmuch-py script though, which I included in my $PATH by 
adding it to ~/bin.

  [notmuch-mutt]: https://notmuchmail.org/notmuch-mutt/
  [this mutt-notmuch-py script]: 
https://github.com/honza/mutt-notmuch-py

Then, I edited my muttrc to include this macro:

    # Search using notmuch
    macro index \\ "<enter-command>unset 
wait_key<enter><shell-escape>mutt-notmuch-py 
~/.mail/temporary/search<enter><change-folder-readonly>+temporary/se
arch<enter>" "search mail (using notmuch)"

It calls mutt-notmuch-py and puts results based on your query in 
~/.mail/temporary/search as a mailbox, then switches to that 
temporary mailbox.

I also wanted to make search results appear in my sidebar, to be 
visible until I ran the macro again, so I added it to my sidebar 
mailbox creation:

    # Notmuch search mailbox
    mailboxes "+--- search --------"
    mailboxes +temporary/search