Using GNUS to search nnmaildir emails

Using GNUS to search nnmaildir emails

[Husain Alshehhi]

Has anyone been been able to search for emails in an nnmaildir group through gnus? When I call 'G G' (gnus-group-read-ephemeral-search-group) on an nnmaildir group, I get

    Group nnselect:nnselect-87msjn9rpu.fsf contains no messages

When I setup my engine to use mu (I have used mu4e before), it fails to run[1][2]. I searched online in different forums and I was not able to find someone with confirmation that search on nnmaildir is working for them (either with the default config, or with mu). Can someone shed light on what configuration actually work? nnimap seems to be working fine.

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2024-08/msg00111.html
[2] https://inbox.vuxu.org/ding/87350ziqeh.fsf@alshehhi.io/

Re: Using GNUS to search nnmaildir emails

[Eric S Fraga]

Response below/inline for email Husain Alshehhi wrote:
> (original email sent  1 Oct 2024 at 21:20)
> 
> Can someone shed light on what configuration actually work? nnimap
> seems to be working fine.

I don't use nnmaildir (I found that it doesn't scale well for my use
case) but use nnml instead.  For this, I use notmuch [1] as the search
engine.  I configure this like this:

#+begin_src emacs-lisp
  (setq gnus-secondary-select-methods
        '((nnml "YYY"
                (gnus-search-engine gnus-search-notmuch
                                    (remove-prefix "/home/XXX/Mail")
                                    (config-file "/home/XXX/.notmuch-config")
                                    )
                (get-new-mail t))))
  (add-to-list 'gnus-search-default-engines '(nnml . notmuch))
  (setq gnus-search-notmuch-remove-prefix "/home/XXX/Mail")
#+end_src
  
Some of this configuration may be superfluous as I usually keep adding
things until I get things working... ;-)

I then have a cron job that runs ~notmuch new~ periodically (every 20
minutes).  Maybe trying the same but with nnmaildir will do the job for
you?

My notmuch configuration is pretty vanilla, having really only set the
path in the [database] section to ~/home/XXX/Mail~.  However, note that
I have no idea whether notmuch handles maildir emails.

HTH,
eric


Footnotes:
[1]  https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Notmuch

-- 
Eric S Fraga via gnus (Emacs 31.0.50 2024-08-16) on Debian 12.6