/notmuch-response

Notmuch hook to tag unreplied messages

Primary LanguagePythonMIT LicenseMIT

notmuch-response

notmuch-response is a notmuch post-new hook that will tag all unreplied messages in your mailboxes. The primary use is to get the list of unreplied e-mails sent to other people (so that you can ping them after some time).

Installation

Follow the following steps:

  • Make sure the new messages are tagged with new (see this page).
  • Copy notmuch-response and post-new to your notmuch hooks directory
  • Customize post-new as it is only a template
  • Run notmuch-response reindex to perform initial indexing

After the initial run, the tags will be updated by the hook every time you run notmuch new.

Problems & bugs

  • Initial reindexing is memory-hungry and it could fail on some humongous mailbox (but I doubt anybody has such a mailbox)
  • notmuch commands do not export the 'In-Reply-To' header so the implementation recreates it from thread structure; it's actually quite pretty, but it would be much simpler to just get the header
  • if used with offlineimap, notmuch-response index makes mutt folders read immediately; it is due to a subtle interplay between offlineimap and notmuch, see Debian Bug #789625 (contains a quick fix)

Internals

The way it works is rather simple: we look at each message in the mailbox and check whether it responds to another message. Then we tag all messages that are replied to (with response tag). All remaining messages will be tagged with noresponse tag. Additional tagging can be done, as it is shown in post-new. For example, I put tag noack on messages that were sent by me, but I got no response to.