notmuch to say#

Thu, 16 Aug 2018 11:57:46 +0000

Very quick one this week, because it's all a bit mad round here right now:

If you are (as I am) using postfix to send and receive mail, and if you are (as I am) using rspamd to identify spam emails, and if you are (as I am) using notmuch to index and search it, you may have noticed (as I did) that notmuch can't add tags based on the presence of the X-Spam header that rspamd adds.

This is what I did:

1) I made postfix do local delivery through maildrop

  services.postfix = {
    extraConfig = ''
      [ ... ]
      mailbox_command = ${pkgs.maildrop}/bin/maildrop -d ''${USER}
    '';
  }

This is for NixOS, obviously, if you are not using Nix then make the equivalent change in /etc/postfix/main.cf

maildrop will default to delivering the mail as normal if it can't find a $HOME/.mailfilter file, so once you have established that its idea of "normal" matches yours then this ought to be a safe change to make for all your users

2) Added a .mailfilter file to run notmuch insert, which accepts a message on standard input, adds it to the notmuch maildir and indexes it - with the specified tags

[dan@vritual:~]$ cat ~/.mailfilter 
if(/X-Spam.+yes/:H) 
  to "|/home/dan/.nix-profile/bin/notmuch insert +spam -inbox"
to "|/home/dan/.nix-profile/bin/notmuch insert -inbox"

I don't manage my my home directory declaratively - if you are running NixOS and have home-manager or something like that, then you can make this change in a more Nixy way.

3) Profit.

In not-really-other news, I embarked on a quick let's-learn re-frame hack to build a mobile-frendly notmuch web interface. It's not quite at "works for me" level yet, and is certainly not at "you can run this on a network" level (it's running the notmuch command with user-supplied arguments ..) but there has been progress.