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Notmuch Need for Notmuch?
June 27th, 2022
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Around the end of 2020, I went through a bit of trouble to
setup an email workflow that revolved around pulling in mail
from various accounts and indexing them with Notmuch.
(Incidentally that was my last post on this lonely phlog,
1.5 years ago!) At the time, I had a ton of email from old
accounts I had used for years, mostly for school-related
work. I made an effort to filter out all of the junk, but at
some point I realized that I just did not need all that
mail. So I deleted almost all of it. I no longer have a
hoard of old letters to thumb through, and I wonder if I
really need notmuch at all anymore!

I am still using notmuch, however, but my workflow has been
adapted. Before, I was pulling in all my mail to an SBC in
my livingroom and deleteing copies off the IMAP servers
after two weeks or so. But the problem with pulling in all
the mail is that you get the junk too, so unless I am using
neomutt on my SBC as my primary inbox, I end up deleting a
lot of the same mail multiple times! Typically I will check
my email on my phone, but since my getmail script runs on a
cron job, it is often the case that mail I delete on my
phone over IMAP has already been pulled to the SBC. You get
the idea.

Running the getmail script manually would solve this, but it
is nice to have mail pulled in periodically without me
having to interfere. What I realized I wanted was some way
to programatically tag mail in notmuch depending on what
folder it originates from on the IMAP server. That way I
could only pull down mail from non-inbox folders that
notmuch would associate with specific tags. I have not found
a good way to do this, however! There seems to be some way
to achieve this using something like offlineimap, but I am
not necessarily interested in syncing my maildirs and imap
folders per se. Another option might be to setup some hook
through my provider's webmail interface that would insert a
particular header when mail is moved to a particular folder.

I am still unsure what is possible/feasible, and without a
lot of time to fiddle with it, my working solution has been
to only pull down mail from my sent and archive IMAP folders
for each account. That way I can delete the shit and still
have IMAP and local access to the mail I want to keep. In
addition to this, I have also setup as many tagging rules as
I could think of in order to have my mail tagged with
minimal intervention on my part. I don't have a ton of mail
anymore, but I do like keeping things around for a period of
time for reference. Last year I needed to reference old
flight itineraries to prove when I had been in the US in
order to report my son and daughter's births at the embassy.
Luckily I still had all of those emails (which were
accidentally, but also serendipitously deleted shortly
after).

Anyway, it has been a long time since I have written here.
It's interesting to look back and see how much I have
learned since I first started hanging around here. Maybe
soon I will write more about the adventures and successes I
have had in programming while lurking around the tildeverse.
But for now, I'm just dropping off this late night ramble
about a rather unremarkable email setup :)