/notmuch-lore

Read public-inbox mailinglists via notmuch

Primary LanguageShell

notmuch-lore

Read public-inbox mailinglists via notmuch.

Being subscribed to high-volume mailinglists can be very damaging to your mail quota. public-inbox solves that problem by offering a Git front-end to a mailinglist. So instead of trying to download 27k emails over IMAP and have your provider start to throttle your requests to a ridiculously low rate (allegedly) after 2k, you can download Git packs at line rate.

The problem with public-inbox is that it is not easy to consume from regular mail readers. This is where notmuch-lore comes in. It connects to public-inbox repos, downloads messages, and converts them to a standard Maildir format.

Setup

It is intended to be used as a pre-new hook together with notmuch. All you need to setup is an INI file containing a section per list you want to sync, specifying the URL. Here is an example config that would track the "netdev" mailinglist from lore.kernel.org:

[netdev]
url=https://lore.kernel.org/netdev

This file must be called sources and live in the .lore directory in your notmuch directory. Typically it will look something like this:

~/mail/.notmuch/
├── hooks
│   └── pre-new -> location-of/notmuch-lore/pre-new
└── .lore
    └── sources

If you then tell notmuch to fetch new mail, e.g. by pressing G from the *notmuch-hello* buffer if you are using the emacs mode, you will sync up your local Maildir to the public-inbox.