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That's the main reason I use mu, although I like notmuch as well. Their tooling is similar in a lot of ways, but for me the most important high-level difference
by mjn 9y ago
That's the main reason I use mu, although I like notmuch as well. Their tooling is similar in a lot of ways, but for me the most important high-level difference between the two is the storage model: in mu, canonical storage is purely in the maildir, while the index is just a search index, which can be deleted and regenerated at any time with no data loss. While notmuch tends to go the other way at least in typical usage, treating the maildir as immutable and using the index for canonical storage of metadata like filing/tagging messages, and even deletion status. Imo that gives mu's storage model more interoperability (anything that correctly manipulates maildirs can be used with it), while notmuch requires more effort to use together with other not-notmuch tools, but has more flexibility (e.g. can easily do gmail-style tagging, vs. the more traditional file-into-folders model maildirs use).
I wrote a bit about this when I investigated the two a few years ago: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/unix_style_mail_tools.html http://www.kmjn.org/notes/unix_style_mail_tools.html
- nextos 9y agoAlso notmuch took a long time to support address completion based on your email index, à la Gmail. Mu had this from almost the beginning. That said, I love both. They are excellent search engines for mutt. Those, along with mbsync make up a wonderful email setup. I have recently transitioned to Gnus, that now supports notmuch [1]. I don't like the notmuch Emacs frontend. The mu one, mu4e, is great though. [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/The-notmuch-Engine.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/The....
- pmoriarty 9y agoI wonder if you could use the mu4e front-end with a notmuch backend.
- mjn 9y agoMu4e communicates with the mu backend through an s-expression based protocol [1], so in principle any other backend that implemented the protocol could work with mu4e. Not aware of anyone having written an alternate backend though. [1] http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man1/mu-server.1.html http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man1/mu-server.1...