email

name	email
description	Search and read pasky's local email (notmuch over ~/Mail maildir), including extracting attachments (PDFs, docx, images). Use when asked to check/find something in email.
compatibility	Requires local notmuch index

Email (notmuch)

pasky's mail lives in ~/Mail, indexed by notmuch.

FIRST: refresh the index

The index is NOT updated automatically on delivery. If you are looking for anything from the last day or so, run this first, always:

notmuch new

(2026-09-03: a booking confirmation that had arrived 20 minutes earlier was invisible to every search until notmuch new was run.)

Search

notmuch search 'from:kacirek subject:XC40 date:2026-08-21'   # threads
notmuch search --output=messages 'from:kacirek date:2026-08-21'  # message ids

Useful terms: from: to: subject: date:YYYY-MM-DD (or ranges date:aug21.., date:today, date:yesterday..), attachment:name, tag:unread, plain words for full-text.

If a search comes up empty, the fix is notmuch new, not grepping ~/Maildir — bodies there are base64/quoted-printable, so grep won't find the text anyway.

Read a message / thread

notmuch show --format=raw id:MESSAGE_ID          # full RFC822 of one message
notmuch show --format=json thread:THREADID       # structured whole thread

For quick body text of a thread, notmuch show thread:... (plain format) is fine (commercial HTML mail like booking.com carries a text/plain alternative, which is what gets printed).

Extract attachments

notmuch show --format=raw id:MESSAGE_ID > /tmp/msg.eml
uv run python - <<'EOF'
import email, email.policy
m = email.message_from_file(open('/tmp/msg.eml'), policy=email.policy.default)
for part in m.walk():
    if fn := part.get_filename():
        out = '/tmp/att-' + fn.replace('/','_').replace(' ','_')
        open(out,'wb').write(part.get_payload(decode=True))
        print('saved', out)
EOF

Then read PDFs with uv run --with pypdf, docx with uv run --with python-docx. Beware non-ASCII filenames (č/š/ž): glob rather than typing them literally.