Bower is a curses frontend for the Notmuch email system. I wrote it for me, but you might like it, too.

bower is written in Mercury.

See some screen shots.

bower makes use of standard Linux utilities, so will likely require some work to work on other systems.

At compile time:

• Mercury compiler (11.07 or later, including release-of-the-day); currently available at http://dl.mercurylang.org/index.html

At run time:

• notmuch
• ncurses with wide character support
• gpgme (GnuPG Made Easy)
• GNU coreutils: base64
• SMTP client to send messages (configurable)
• lynx to dump HTML emails (configurable)
• file(1) to detect MIME types when adding attachments

To create a man page from this readme, you will need:

• pandoc universal document converter
• awk

Firstly, to install Mercury from source you can follow these steps:

tar xf mercury-srcdist-VERSION.tar.gz
cd mercury-srcdist-VERSION
./configure --prefix=/path/to/mercury
make install PARALLEL=-j6 LIBGRADES=
export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/mercury/bin

where PARALLEL=-j6 reflects the number of parallel jobs to use.

With Mercury installed and mmc in your PATH, run:

make PARALLEL=-j6

You may want to edit Mercury.options to suit your system. If successful, you will get a binary named bower.

To generate a man page, run:

make man

This will produce bower.1 for installation into your man search path.

You can configure bower by creating a file in one of the following locations, in order of priority:

• the path specified in the environment variable BOWER_CONFIG (if set)

• the path $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/bower/bower.conf (if the environment variable XDG_CONFIG_HOME is set and non-empty)

• the path $HOME/.config/bower/bower.conf (if the environment variable HOME is set)

• a path $basedir/bower/bower.conf where $basedir is an element of the colon-separated list given in the environment variable XDG_CONFIG_DIRS (defaults to /etc/xdg)

The details of the configuration file are given in bower.conf.sample.

Bower is designed such that it can be run on the local machine but call out to notmuch on a remote machine (that holds your mail) via ssh. The advantage is that you can start helper programs on the local machine (e.g. a web browser or image viewer), and add or save attachments on the local filesystem, even if your mail archive is stored on a different machine.

Bower also keeps some centralised information in the notmuch configuration file. You may wish to tell bower about your Maildir hierarchy, namely where to place draft and sent messages. The defaults are given here:

[bower:maildir]
drafts_folder = Drafts
sent_folder = Sent

It is recommended that your .notmuch-config file contains at least these search exclusions:

[search]
exclude_tags=deleted;draft

Run bower or bower SEARCH-TERMS to start. By default, Bower displays the last week's worth of mail. You can change that by setting the ~default search alias; see below.

There are two main views: the index, and the combined thread/pager.

This view shows the notmuch search results for the current query. The keys are:

j, k            next, previous thread
g, G            first, last thread
[, ]            scroll half page up, down
Tab, comma      go to next unread thread
Enter           open thread
l, ~            change search terms ("limit")
=               refresh search results

/, ?            search for string within results
n               skip to next search result

N               toggle 'unread' tag on current thread
F               toggle 'flagged' tag on current thread
a               toggle 'inbox', 'unread' tags on current thread (archive)
d               set 'deleted' tag on current thread
u               unset 'deleted' tag on current thread
+, -            add/remove arbitrary tags
t               select/unselect thread
T               unselect all threads
'               bulk tag changes on selected threads
"               same as ' but retain selections afterwards

m               compose new message
r               reply to sender
e               reply to everyone
L               reply to list
R               recall postponed message
@               add to address book

q               quit

This view pages through an entire thread. The keys are:

j, k            next, previous message
g, G            first, last message
b, space        previous, next page
\, Enter        previous, next line
[, ]            previous, next half page
Tab, comma      go to next unread message
p               go to parent message
S               skip quoted text
O               toggle ordering of messages (threaded or flat)
=               refresh search results

/, ?            search for string
n               skip to next search result

J               mark current message read and go to next message
K               mark current message read and go to previous message
N               toggle 'unread' tag on current message
^R              remove 'unread' tag on preceding messages
F               toggle 'flagged' tag on current message
a               toggle 'inbox', 'unread' tags on current message (archive)
d               add 'deleted' tag on current message
u               remove 'deleted' tag on current message
+, -            add/remove arbitrary tags
t               select/unselect message
T               unselect all messages
'               bulk tag changes on selected threads
"               same as ' but retain selections afterwards

r               reply to sender
e               reply to everyone
L               reply to list
W               forward message
B               resend message to another address ("bounce")
E               use current message as a template for a new message
R               recall postponed message
@               add to address book

v               highlight next visible attachment or URL or folded text
V               highlight next visible attachment or top of message
s               save highlighted message/part
o               open highlighted message/part/URL with external program
z               cycle alternative parts / toggle inline display / decrypt
Z               toggle inline display of part / decrypt
z, o            expand/collapse folded text
y               verify signed part

i, q            return to index
I               return to index, removing 'unread' tag on all messages
A               return to index, removing 'inbox' and 'unread' on messages

The 'o' command, which opens parts and URLs, takes a command using Unix shell quoting syntax. If the command ends with an unquoted '&' character then the command will be run in the background.

Note: forward (W) and edit-as-new (E) currently will not create a proper message template for messages that are manually decrypted in the thread view. A workaround is to set crypto.decrypt_by_default = true in the bower configuration so that encrypted messages are automatically decrypted upon opening a thread.

The l (limit) command in the index view slightly extends the notmuch search term syntax with these macros:

~A              disable default cap on number of search results
~F              tag:flagged
~U              tag:unread
~D              tag:deleted
~d DATE..DATE
~d DATE..
~d ..DATE
~d DATE

By default, a maximum of 300 search results will be displayed. Add ~A to the search string to get all results.

The ~d syntax passes dates through to notmuch as a "date:" range; see notmuch-search-terms(7) for the date range syntax. You may use curly brackets to surround date strings containing spaces. The single date form ~d DATE is equivalent to ~d DATE..DATE.

Some examples:

~d 2011-06-01..
~d {2 weeks ago}..{last week}
~d yesterday

In addition to the built-in macros, bower will try to expand tokens of the form ~NAME in two ways:

• if there is a search term alias called NAME then the token will be replaced with its expansion

• if there is a notmuch named query called NAME then the token will be replaced with query:NAME

Search term aliases are defined in the notmuch config file in a section called [bower:search_alias]. Expansions may make use of other (non-recursive) expansions. For example:

[bower:search_alias]
default = ~lw
lw = ~d {last week}..
2w = ~d {2 weeks ago}..
lm = ~d {last month}..
ly = ~d {last year}..
notmuch = to:notmuch
bower = ~notmuch AND bower
bower_recent = ~lm ~bower

As mentioned earlier, the ~default alias sets the initial search query if you run bower without command-line arguments.

The differences between search term aliases and notmuch named queries are:

• search term aliases are specific to bower
• search term aliases may use bower-specific syntax, and refer to other search term aliases
• named queries are stored in the notmuch database instead of the notmuch config file

You can tab complete search term aliases and notmuch named queries.

Tag modifications in the index view are (mostly) performed asynchronously to minimise stutter. Remember to quit properly using 'q' to ensure all tag modifications are completed before exiting. Tag modifications will be retried a limited number of times on failure, e.g. because the notmuch database is locked (this was a problem with old notmuch versions).

Unlike the index view, tag modifications in the thread/pager view will only applied upon returning to the index view. If bower is terminated before returning to the index view then any tag modifications made in the thread view will be lost.

By default, bower will call notmuch count every 60 seconds in both the index and thread views in order to notify you of new unread messages matching the search terms in the index, or new messages in the current thread. You can change the polling frequency or disable it with the configuration option ui.poll_period_secs.

You can also configure a command to run when new messages are found using the command.poll_notify option.

Bower can use notmuch address command to look up email addresses where required, e.g. when composing a new message. Only addresses that appear in the From header of messages from the last year will be considered; this restriction improves performance and avoids finding stale email addresses.

Address aliases can also be kept in the notmuch config file in a section called [bower:addressbook]. For example:

[bower:addressbook]
someone = Someone <[email protected]>
someoneelse = [email protected]

You can add to the address book using '@' in the index or thread views.

Tab completion will prefer address aliases over addresses found by notmuch address.

You can send mail through one or more accounts defined in bower.conf. An account is selected by matching the From address on the message to the address on the account. Bower performs two steps when sending a message:

1. Run the configured sendmail command with the message on standard input. The command should pass the message onto an SMTP server. If the sendmail command fails (exits with non-zero status) then the message is considered not sent, and the next step does not run.

2. Run the "post-sendmail" step.

   The default behaviour (if post_sendmail is not set) is to use notmuch insert to add the message to the mail store, and to the database with the sent tag and without the unread tag.

   Otherwise, if post_sendmail is set to a non-empty command then the command is run with the message on standard input.

   Otherwise, if post_sendmail is set to the empty string then no command is run.

If both the sendmail and post_sendmail commands will run on the same remote server then there is a slight inefficiency because a single message would need to be transferred to the remote server twice. If that is a concern, you could combine the two steps into a single script to be run at the sendmail step, and disable the post_sendmail command.

Bower can produce encrypted and/or signed PGP/MIME messages through GnuPG. Message decryption and signature verification are performed by notmuch. It is up to the user to configure GnuPG on the machines running bower or notmuch.

Peter Wang [email protected]

Feel free to contact me with feedback or suggestions.