Notmuch mail integration

notmuch (http://notmuchmail.org/) is a local mail indexer that lets you organize your mail via tags, which can be manipulated using various interfaces. It's like using gmail but much more unixy :) Although notmuch is build around a single xapian-index for each user, it doesn't loch this index completely, as sup (http://sup.rubyforge.org/) does for instance. Apart from the Emacs mode and cli binary you can manipulate your mails using go/python or ruby bindings.

Here is a starting point how you can get notmuch mail integrated in your desktop. I wrote a little vicious worker function to update widgets, you can get it here: https://github.com/pazz/configs/raw/master/.config/awesome/notmuch.lua It requires the json module however, which is packaged as "liblua5.1-json" in debian/ubuntu.

I put it next to my rc.lua and use it to update mail widgets this way:

--rc.lua
require('notmuch')
...
mailicon = widget({ type = 'imagebox', name = 'mailicon'})
mailtext = widget({ type = "textbox" })
querystring = "is:inbox and not tag:killed"
vicious.register(mailtext, vicious.contrib.notmuch,
function (widget, args)
    if args["count"] > 0 then
            mailicon.image = image(beautiful.widget_mail)
    else
            mailicon.image = image(beautiful.widget_nomail)
    end
    return args["latest"]["tags"]
end,
10, querystring)
mailbuttons = awful.util.table.join(
  awful.button({ }, 1, function () awful.util.spawn("urxvt -T alot -e alot '"..querystring.."'") end)
)
mailicon:buttons(mailbuttons)

the worker takes a querystring, in my case "is:inbox and not tag:killed" and returns an as "count", the number of matching messages and as "latest", a lua table that represents the latest message. Particularly, we can read the follwing keys from "latest": from, subject, id, timestamp, tags, and date_relative. That means that if you want to display the subject of the latest mail on a textwidget somewhere, read

args["latest"]["subject"]

I adjusted the my maildir hoover script Email_maildir_naughty_hoover to query notmuch for messages: grap it here: https://raw.github.com/pazz/configs/master/.config/awesome/notmuchhoover.lua place it next to your rc.lua and attach it to a widget like this:

require('notmuchhoover')
notmuchhoover.addToWidget(mailicon, "is:inbox", 30)

The first argment is your widget, the second the querystring and the last one is the maximal number of matches you want displayed. Full esample:

mailicon = widget({ type = 'imagebox', name = 'mailicon'})
mailtext = widget({ type = "textbox" })
querystring = "is:inbox and not tag:killed"
vicious.register(mailtext, vicious.contrib.notmuch,
function (widget, args)
    if args["count"] > 0 then
            mailicon.image = image(beautiful.widget_mail)
    else
            mailicon.image = image(beautiful.widget_nomail)
    end
    return args["latest"]["tags"]
end,
10, querystring)
mailbuttons = awful.util.table.join(
  awful.button({ }, 1, function () awful.util.spawn("urxvt -T alot -e alot '"..querystring.."'") end)
)
mailicon:buttons(mailbuttons)
notmuchhoover.addToWidget(mailicon, querystring, 30)

It looks like this