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I ran Gnus with notmuch backend (nnir-notmuch) for many months. It's not very fast as Gnus is not very quick on Maildirs. Scoring could be quite easy to implem

by nextos 9y ago

I ran Gnus with notmuch backend (nnir-notmuch) for many months. It's not very fast as Gnus is not very quick on Maildirs. Scoring could be quite easy to implement with auto-tagging. Tags are a unifying concept in email. You can implement any custom user logic with tags. What notmuch is missing is a bit of tooling to do this. It'd be cool if this tooling had access to any arbitrary header, as you have pointed out. I feel I don't need BBDB integration when I have autocompletion based on the email database. That said, there's bbdb-notmuch.el, and I assume other options as message-mode is really a Gnus thing. I think basic two-way sync is almost always needed. Otherwise you end up with a huge inbox and even if you don't care at all about the remote IMAP store, mbsync calls will start slowing down.

pmoriarty 9y ago
Autocompletion from the notmuch database is fine when you don't have many addresses in there. But when you are subscribed to a bunch of large mailing lists and you try to search your notmuch database for "John" you're going to get a thousand completion candidates. If instead you search just your BBDB database, which only has the contacts you actually correspond with, you're going to get just the useful and relevant ones... and you'll always have the notmuch database to search on as a backup, in case the contact you want to to correspond with is not in BBDB yet.
- nextos 9y ago
  Sure, all these points are true. Notmuch is a bit unfinished I think. What email setup do you have?
  - pmoriarty 9y ago
    I'm actually using notmuch in emacs myself, but I'm just running in to a bunch of its limitations and looking around for an alternative. Very sorry to hear that Gnus with a notmuch backend is slow, as that's what I was considering trying next.
    - nextos 9y ago
      Maybe give Gnus a try anyway. It might not be that slow on good hardware. Or just run it coupled with a Dovecot server. I really like Notmuch's interface. I think limitations are perhaps not that hard to patch on Elisp unless you have a complicated setup. I'm trying to implement a DSL to coordinate tag <-> maildir sync on top of a few macros.

by nextos 9y ago

pmoriarty 9y ago

Autocompletion from the notmuch database is fine when you don't have many addresses in there. But when you are subscribed to a bunch of large mailing lists and you try to search your notmuch database for "John" you're going to get a thousand completion candidates. If instead you search just your BBDB database, which only has the contacts you actually correspond with, you're going to get just the useful and relevant ones... and you'll always have the notmuch database to search on as a backup, in case the contact you want to to correspond with is not in BBDB yet.

nextos 9y ago
Sure, all these points are true. Notmuch is a bit unfinished I think. What email setup do you have?
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  I'm actually using notmuch in emacs myself, but I'm just running in to a bunch of its limitations and looking around for an alternative. Very sorry to hear that Gnus with a notmuch backend is slow, as that's what I was considering trying next.
  - nextos 9y ago
    Maybe give Gnus a try anyway. It might not be that slow on good hardware. Or just run it coupled with a Dovecot server. I really like Notmuch's interface. I think limitations are perhaps not that hard to patch on Elisp unless you have a complicated setup. I'm trying to implement a DSL to coordinate tag <-> maildir sync on top of a few macros.