One of my weekend tasks was to reorganize my email environment. For reading email I use mutt, configured to grab the email from an IMAP server. For sending email, I have a minimal exim setup securely relaying to a smart host.
Mutt is a great email browser, but it is very bad at handling IMAP. Besides, I started to need searching through all my email. The solution for the first problem is offlineimap, a program wrote in Python, that “synchronizes emails between two repositories”. It downloads my email from the IMAP server into my laptop, so I work in my email locally, and if I delete an email locally, offlineimap will delete it in the next sync operation.
The solution for the second problem, the search, is notmuch, which is a email indexer, enabling fast searches among a vast mail collection. So, once new mail arrive (or is deleted) with offlineimap, notmuch (de)indexes it.
But another problem appear: how to query to notmch in an integrated way with my mail reader? One solution is provided by mutt-kz, a fork of mutt with notmuch support tightly integrated.
But I use Debian, and I like its package management. So I needed to craft a Debian package for mutt-kz.
I grabbed the Debian’s repository for mutt and re-based, one by one, the patches from mutt-kz.
The result is stored in this repository.
And now, I can query notmuch in mutt and immediately browse the result set.
Hey there.
Thanks for your work, works like a charm.
In case you have not seen it yet, mutt-kz has gained sidebar support since your patches. I would very much appreciate if you updated your repository to support these 🙂
Hi Valodim,
Yes, I saw the update in the sidebar. Personally I don’t use the sidebar, but certainly I can add those patches in my little fork. I’ll try to allocate sometime this weekend.
And thanks a lot for using it 🙂
vmjl
Ew.
What about the people that are not using debian?
I have compiled mutt in the past, I was expecting notmuch patches on top of ‘master’.
It seems that the mutt maintainers are not very receptive to new functionality, their latest release is from 2010. As a matter of fact, mutt-ng born because all the patches were floating around, no integrated into mutt.
What would be the best approach to unify mutt again? I don’t know.
In the post you are writing about a “mutt-ks”, but it’s “mutt-kz”.
I am mentioning this, since your posting is really useful as an explanation and signpost wrt mutt-kz and also for people wanting to try it out under Debian. So writing mutt-kz correctly would reduce confusion and correctly feed the search engines…
Thanks!
*t
Hi Tomáš!
Thanks for your review! Now it’s fixed.