AIaidenn0·Oct 5, 2018
I'm really happy with my e-mail setup of offlineimap, afew, notmuch, bower.
http://www.offlineimap.org/
https://github.com/afewmail/afew
https://github.com/wangp/bower
In Guide to email in Emacs using mu and mu4eafewmail
afew
Python2012–2018
afewmail / afew
afew
an initial tagging script for notmuch mail
5Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
343GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
an initial tagging script for notmuch mail
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- pazz/alot · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year5 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2012-07-07 00:09:50 UTC to 2018-10-05 23:01:09 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
5 sourcesYou should take a look at notmuch [1]. It takes a little bit of time to get started (I recommend afew [2] for initial tagging), but I don't think I could ever go back to another mail system. It changes the way that you go through mail, no more folders: between tagging and extremely fast searches, there's no need. Just like an application launcher on modern desktops, there's no need to go through a big menu: press your search key, type what you're thinking, and there it is.
It doubles the size of your maildir with the indexing, which is a downside if you're crunched for space, but maybe that gives you an idea for just how much is indexed and how fast you can expect searching to be.
It's fair to say that the most popular interface for it is the emacs interface, which is great if you're already using emacs for mail because your workflow won'
Read the rest
t change substantially. There are other interfaces available, I have used one called alot [3] and find it to be very good as well.
[1]: https://notmuchmail.org/
[2]: https://github.com/afewmail/afew
[3]: https://github.com/pazz/alot
I share your frustrations with Notmuch as an Emacs client. But I still find it better than Gnus and Mu4e. And I have tested all 3 extensively aside from using Mutt for a decade.
I think making the Notmuch interface "pure" is a great design decision. By pure I mean that it just operates on tags, but never deletes or moves files and it doesn't even know about folders.
This gives it great flexibility. You can implement virtually any logic in a Maildir backend by remapping tags to actual files. Any arbitrarily complicated workflow, silencing, automated scoring like what Gnus offers, etc. is possible while the UI will be the same. Just tagging.
The problem is that Notmuch developers do not bundle any tools for implementing such a backend with notmuch, and third party stuff like afew [1] is lacking. It reminds me a bit about the situation with
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address completion. For a long time, mu offered this, while notmuch relied on hacky third party scripts.
[1] https://github.com/afewmail/afew
I've only been using mu for about a week, so I'm not any kind of expert. On the other hand I did just spend a bunch of time reading about both mu and notmuch to try to pick one (and picked mu), so I can list some of what I came across, since it's pretty fresh in my mind.
The main difference is in data models: mu uses Maildirs for message filing, while notmuch uses the Xapian db for message tagging. mu uses a traditional file-into-folders paradigm, where the folders are on-disk Maildir folders. You file messages by moving them. notmuch on the other hand uses a Gmail-style message-tags paradigm, where tags are stored in the Xapian db and the original files are treated as immutable. Messages on disk are never touched/moved; all changes to message state (even "deleting") are just tags in the db.
IMO that makes notmuch more flexible: a tag can
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be anything, with user-defined tags and "built-in" tags like sender and subject being treated similarly. mu on the other hand treats the Maildir files as the canonical db, so its index includes only data from there: the message headers and content, the folder, etc. (no user-defined tags). An advantage of that is that it makes mu more interoperable, since other clients can read the Maildir structure without having to know about mu. It also makes mu feel a bit "safer" to me, since the Xapian db is purely a search index that can be regenerated at any time from the Maildir files with no data loss. On the other hand, notmuch's choice to never modify/delete/touch your original mail files is safer in a different way.
Other differences:
- mu is mainly developed by one developer (HN user djcb), while notmuch is more of a group effort. Some pros and cons to each there.
- mu has a very nice proper manual. notmuch's documentation isn't bad, but it's not a nice proper manual.
- mu collects a contact db by default. I believe there's also a solution for notmuch to do that though.
- notmuch has a procmail-replacement story, https://github.com/teythoon/afew, whereas many mu users still use procmail for initial message handling
- I like mu4e, the emacs mail client that's developed together with mu. I haven't tried integrating either mu or notmuch with mutt or another client, though, so I don't know how they compare on that.
> Ihmo there isn't so much left to innovate in an email client
There is interesting innovation going on, for instance <http://notmuchmail.org/>; (and satellite projects such as <https://github.com/teythoon/afew>; and <https://github.com/pazz/alot>.
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