On Sun, 20 Mar 2011 20:30:52 -0700, Mueen Nawaz <mueen at nawaz.org> wrote: > > Hi, > > I'm trying to experiment with notmuch. > > As I understand it, notmuch does not handle mbox for input. The problem > is that all my mail is currently in mbox format. > > So I first tried converting mbox to maildir using mb2md. > > It didn't do a good job. When I subsequently tried importing to notmuch, > notmuch complained about lots of non-mail files - I confirmed that > indeed mb2md had botched converting those emails. > > So then I tried to convert to mh format using Sylpheed. This seemed to > go well, but then when importing to notmuch, it complained again for > about 20 emails, and a manual check confirmed that some messages did not > get converted properly to mh (they don't show up in Sylpheed). > > And then I noticed another discrepancy. mutt shows that I started with > 44473 messages in mbox. When I imported into Sylpheed, it showed 44482 > messages (no idea where the extra 9 came from). However, notmuch is > reporting that it processed 44482 files, but that it added 35602 > messages. > > Why only 35602 (it complained for only about 20 messages)? A search > confirmed that some messages that show up in both mutt (in mbox) and > Sylpheed (in mh format) were not indexed. > > So I want to know: When you guys switched to notmuch, how did you ensure > you did not miss any emails. I really, really, really don't want to lose > any emails in this process! > > Thanks. > > _______________________________________________ > notmuch mailing list > notmuch at notmuchmail.org > http://notmuchmail.org/mailman/listinfo/notmuch
It would've been a no-brainer if you'd been using Maildir all along (mbox is evil incarnate), but... I'd suggest keeping your original mbox file safe in git [1], and consistently commiting every step of the way, so even if messages were to get lost in translation, you still have a way to get them back, with negligible storage overhead (just remember to "git gc --aggressive --prune=now" when you're finished). Compacting the mbox file, i.e. purging all stale messages (sync-mailbox in mutt?) and diffing to HEAD could then possibly give you an indication as to the origin of the 9 surplus files. For the actual conversion to Maildir (and any type of mail fetching in general), I'd suggest using FDM [2], you'll never look back. Regarding the significant discrepancy between processed and added files in Notmuch: Could be dupes (e.g. mail to/cc/bcc yourself or mailing lists, ending up in both Inbox and Sent), which are automatically suppressed by Notmuch. [1] http://git-scm.com/ [2] http://fdm.sourceforge.net/