notmuch: automatically mark uninteresting mails as read

Now that I switched from Emacs’ GNUS to Emacs’ notmuch, I needed a method to automatically “discard” uninteresting mails. In some Linux mailing lists a huge amount of mails are about topics that I don’t care. So I a little shell script bin/pollmail.sh that polls the mails and efficiently marks uninteresting stuff as read.

Prepare notmuch

But first, have a look at a snipped from ~/.notmuch-config:

[new]
tags=unread

This makes notmuch tak all newly imported mails with the tag ‘+unread’.

How to tag based on a filer

When I filter messages, obviously I only need to filter such mails. So I could do

holger@holger$ notmuch tag -unread -- tag:unread (subject:boring or subject:moreboring)

That would even work… if I hadn’t so many subjects that don’t interest me with the type of embedded hardware that I use: ARM64, Allwinner, Rockchip, KVM, kexec, PCI, PCIe … … … more than 100 topics are of no interest to me.

Clearly the command line would get too long.

Using notmuch tag --batch

But wait, there’s notmuch tag --batch available, so we can use that.

Prepare list of uninteresting terms …

But first, let’s define the topics for the various mailing lists that I don’t care about. This is an expert from what I tend to ignore on the linux-arm-kernel mailing list:

#!/bin/bash

read -r -d '\n' UNINTERESTING_LKA <<'EOF'
#
#Subsystems
#
acpi
arm64
dmaengine
kexec
kvm
mdio
mtd
pci*
spi-nor
vdma

…

moxart
tango*
EOF

I could have written the assignment of the uninteresting topics to $UNINTERESTING_LKA also more traditionally:

UNINTERESTING_LKA+="acpi "
UNINTERESTING_LKA+="arm64 "

But I like the above method more, less typing involved.

… create a query from it …

The following now creates a query inside a temporary file and asks notmuch to execute the tag command with it. Because the search runs only on unread mails, it’s actually quite fast. Despite the fact that I have now around 100 uninteresting terms.

mark_uninteresting_do()
{
        echo "- marking uninteresting in $1"
        local i
        echo -n "-unread -- " >/tmp/notmuch.$$
        echo -n "tag:unread " >>/tmp/notmuch.$$
        echo -n "folder:$1 (subject:grumblfutz" >>/tmp/notmuch.$$
        for i in $2; do
                test ${i:0:1} == "#" && continue
                # echo "i:$i"
                echo -n " OR subject:$i" >> /tmp/notmuch.$$
        done
        echo ")" >> /tmp/notmuch.$$
        # cat /tmp/notmuch.$$
        notmuch tag --batch </tmp/notmuch.$$
        rm -f /tmp/notmuch.$$
}

… and apply everything

The code that runs this is actually simple:

mark_uninteresting()
{
        mark_uninteresting_do linux-arm-kernel "$UNINTERESTING_LKA"
        mark_uninteresting_do linux-mmc        "$UNINTERESTING_MMC"
        mark_uninteresting_do linux-can        "$UNINTERESTING_CAN"
}