For the past few months, I’ve had a bit of a background project going to ensure that my cloud-hosted personal data is safely archived on my own, self-hosted hardware, just in case. Google services are nice 'n' all, but I’m not 100% happy trusting them with everything in the long run.

Part of this project has been to archive my old email collection from GMail, which dates back to the initial public beta in 2004(ish?) -- and make it searchable, because what’s the point in having all that email if you can’t find the needle in the 20-year haystack when you need it?

Enter “notmuch” -- a “fast, global-search and tag-based email system”, which runs as a set of UNIX CLI commands, and is inspired by Sup, a mailreader I used previously.