Setting up Gmail with Notmuch

If you're looking to use Gmail with Notmuch in a modern email workflow—especially within Emacs—this post guides you through setting it up using lieer, a simple tool that syncs Gmail labels with Notmuch tags. We'll use nix to install tools in an isolated environment, and integrate everything with Emacs.

Installing Notmuch and Lieer

To get started quickly, I used a temporary nix shell. If you're using home-manager, you can permanently add notmuch and lieer there.

nix shell nixpkgs#{notmuch, lieer}

Notmuch Initial Setup

Initialize Notmuch with:

notmuch setup

You'll be prompted for some initial information. Here's a sample configuration:

Your full name [Stig]: ZeStig
Your primary email address [stig@host]: zestig@duck.com
Additional email address [Press 'Enter' if none]:
Top-level directory of your email archive [/home/stig/mail]: /home/stig/.mail
Tags to apply to all new messages (separated by spaces) [unread inbox]: new
Tags to exclude when searching messages (separated by spaces) [deleted spam]:

Important: Edit ~/.notmuch-config to include the following in the [new] section:

[new]
tags=new
ignore=/.*[.](json|lock|bak)$/

Setting up Lieer (`gmi`)

Create the email directory and initialize the Gmail repo:

mkdir -p ~/.mail/zestig/
notmuch new
cd ~/.mail/zestig/
gmi init zestig@duck.com

Apply these minor config tweaks:

gmi set --replace-slash-with-dot
gmi set --ignore-tags-local new

Now, start the sync process.

It will open a browser to authenticate with Gmail. Be sure to sign in with the correct account!

gmi sync

Configuring Emacs for Notmuch

Custom `sendmail` wrapper

Create a script called gmi-sendmail and place it in your $PATH:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
MAILBOX_PATH="$HOME/.mail/zestig/"

# Read email content from stdin and send via gmi
gmi send --quiet -C "$MAILBOX_PATH" -t

Make it executable with chmod +x gmi-sendmail.

Emacs Configuration

Admittedly this part took me way more time than it should have.

Emacs supports notmuch very well. It is, in my humble opinion, among the best Email clients out there (along with mu4e) of course. So here's how to configure notmuch in Emacs:

(defun stig/sendmail-via-gmi ()
  "Send mail using the `gmi-sendmail' shell script as the `sendmail' program."
  (let ((sendmail-program "gmi-sendmail"))
    (message-send-mail-with-sendmail)))

(use-package notmuch
  :config
  (setq sendmail-program "gmi-sendmail"
        message-send-mail-function #'stig/sendmail-via-gmi
        notmuch-fcc-dirs nil
        notmuch-always-prompt-for-sender 'nil
        notmuch-search-oldest-first nil)
  (setq notmuch-saved-searches
        '((:name "inbox"
                 :query "tag:inbox"
                 :sort-order newest-first)
          (:name "unread"
                 :query "tag:unread"
                 :sort-order newest-first))))

This will let you compose, send, and manage emails all within Emacs using Notmuch and Gmail.

Setting up Gmail with Notmuch