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muchsync - synchronize notmuch mail across machines

Notmuch is a nice mail indexer with front ends for emacs and vim. If you like the idea of fully-indexed, tag-based email like gmail, but you don’t want a cloud- or web-based solution, then notmuch may be for you. However, notmuch stores all of your mail locally on one machine. Hence, until now, if you wanted the full benefit of notmuch tags, you could only conveniently read your email on a single machine.

Muchsync brings notmuch to all of your computers by synchronizing your mail messages and notmuch tags across machines. The protocol is heavily pipelined to work efficiently over high-latency networks such as mobile broadband. Muchsync supports arbitrary pairwise synchronization among replicas. A version-vector-based algorithm allows it to exchange only the minimum information necessary to bring replicas up to date regardless of which pairs have previously synchronized. Muchsync requires storage proportional to the number of replicas plus the number of email messages you have. It consumes bandwidth proportional to the number of replicas plus the number of new/changed messages. In practice, the per-replica data is tiny (just two 64-bit numbers per replica, independent of how many messages you have), so there is no penalty for having many replicas.

To set up muchsync, you must install it on both your mail server and each machine that will replicate your mail. To create a new replica, you need to give muchsync two pieces of information: 1) the name of a remote machine currently storing your email, to which you must have ssh access, and 2) the name of a local directory muchsync can create to store a copy of your mail. If the remote machine is SERVER and the destination directory is $HOME/inbox, you would run:

muchsync --init $HOME/inbox SERVER

Initialization will create a $HOME/.notmuch-config file for you based on the one on SERVER. Note that if you’ve run muchsync before, SERVER can be any replica; it doesn’t have to be your main mail server. This command will download and index all of your mail. Initialization can take a very long time because it builds a full text index on a single CPU. This is a limitation of how notmuch tracks threads, which makes it impossible to parallelize first-time index creation.

Once set up, using muchsync is as easy as typing this each time you want to check for new mail:

muchsync SERVER

That command brings the client and SERVER up to date with any tag and message changes, and should generally run efficiently if you don’t have much mail to download. If, after using the above command to synchronize your desktop with a server, you also want your mail on a laptop, you can push the mail from your desktop to the laptop with:

muchsync LAPTOP

Requirements

To build muchsync, you will need a C++11 compiler and the headers and libraries from notmuch, Xapian, SQLite3, and OpenSSL’s libcrypto. To run muchsync, you will need ssh.

Download

Documentation

Contact

Please email questions, comments, testimonials, bug reports, patches, and pull requests to the author (preferably with the word “muchsync” in the email subject). For pull requests, please spare me the trouble of navigating any web sites and include a raw git fetch command that makes FETCH_HEAD point to whatever it is you would like me to merge.

muchsync is brought to you by David Mazières of the Stanford Secure Computer Systems group and Mail Avenger project.