Re: Create a group from a list of message-ids

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Alexander Baier <lexi.baier@gmail.com> writes:

> Hello Eric,
>
> On 13-11-25 10:01 Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
>> Alexander Baier <lexi.baier@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> Hello David,
>>>
>>> On 13-11-25 03:02 Dave Goldberg wrote:
>>>>> Hello,
>>>>> I use a tool called mu [1] to index and search my mail, which is stored
>>>>> in a Maildir folder. mu is able to give me the message ids of all the
>>>>> mails that match a given query. I want to use these ids to create a new
>>>>> group in gnus that shows the search result. So it basically boils down
>>>>> to this:
>>>>
>>>>> Is there a function or facility in gnus that takes a list of message-ids
>>>>> (or even a list of local path names) and creates a new group containing
>>>>> the corresponding messages?
>>>>
>>>>> I am fine with writing some elisp to call out to mu and converting its
>>>>> output to a list, I just need above mentioned functionality.
>>>>
>>>> nnir.el provides an interface to various search capabilities and
>>>> although I can't speak to it as I don't use it, I see maildir
>>>> mentioned for one of the backends.  Perhaps that is enough to get you
>>>> started.
>>>
>>> Thank you for that tipp. I just looked at a few backends for nnir and
>>> found that the namazu backend provides similar if not the same
>>> capabilities as the command line utility mu.
>>>
>>> I will look into this and see if it meets my demands.
>>
>> If you're willing to consider switching indexing backends, I'd also
>> recommend notmuch, which I found more flexible and easier to use than
>> namazu or mairix.
>>
>> Eric
>
> I did not yet give notmuch a look, could you point out what in your
> opinion make notmuch more flexible than namazu?

Hmm, I was afraid you'd ask that! :)

As far as I can recall, the interface to namazu felt very slow, and the
search syntax was much more awkward and limited than notmuch. Notmuch
just feels easier to use: it caches recent queries, lets you filter
previous queries more easily, and makes browsing the results quite easy
-- it actually acts as its own little MUA, with threading and
everything. (Actually that can be annoying when all you want is the
original message.) Mairix can't do unicode indexing, so that was right
out.

Test-installing notmuch isn't too onerous (though the initial indexing
is slow), it keeps all its business in one directory that you can nuke
if you don't like it. It also ships with all the necessary elisp files.
It's also under very active (borderline obsessive) development.

The notmuch developers paid me nothing for this message :)

Eric