notmuch-dump - creates a plain-text dump of the tags of each message

       Carl Worth and many others

       2009-2024, Carl Worth and many others

0.38.3                                            Mar 11, 2025                                   NOTMUCH-DUMP(1)

       Dump tags for messages matching the given search terms.

       Output is to the given filename, if any, or to stdout.

       These  tags  are  the  only  data  in  the  notmuch  database  that  can't be recreated from the messages
       themselves. The output of notmuch dump is therefore the only critical thing  to  backup  (and  much  more
       friendly to incremental backup than the native database files.)

       See  notmuch-search-terms for details of the supported syntax for <search-terms>. With no search terms, a
       dump of all messages in the database will  be  generated.  A  --  argument  instructs  notmuch  that  the
       remaining arguments are search terms.

       Supported options for dump include

       --gzip Compress the output in a format compatible with gzip(1).--format=(sup|batch-tag)
              Notmuch  restore supports two plain text dump formats, both with one message-id per line, followed
              by a list of tags.

              batch-tag
                     The default batch-tag dump format is intended to more robust against malformed  message-ids
                     and tags containing whitespace or non-ascii(7)characters.Eachlinehastheform:

                        +<*encoded-tag*\ > +<*encoded-tag*\ > ... -- id:<*quoted-message-id*\ >

                     Tagsarehex-encodedbyreplacingeverybytenotmatchingtheregex[A-Za-z0-9@=.,_+-]with%nnwherennisthetwodigithexencoding.ThemessageIDisavalidXapianquery,quotedusingXapianbooleantermquotingrules:iftheIDcontainswhitespaceoracloseparenorstartswithadoublequote,itmustbeenclosedindoublequotesanddoublequotesinsidetheIDmustbedoubled.Theastutereaderwillnoticethisisaspecialcaseofthebatchinputformatfornotmuch-tag;notethatthesinglemessage-idqueryismandatoryfornotmuch-restore.sup    The sup dump file format is specifically chosen to be compatible with the format  of  files
                     produced  by  sup-dump(1).Soifyou'vepreviouslybeenusingsupformail,thenthenotmuch-restorecommandprovidesyouawaytoimportallofyourtags(orlabelsassupcallsthem).Eachlinehasthefollowingform:

                        <*message-id*\ > **(** <*tag*\ > ... **)**

                     withzeroormoretagsareseparatedbyspaces.Notethat(malformed)message-idsmaycontainarbitrarynon-nullcharacters.Notealsothattagswithspaceswillnotbecorrectlyrestoredwiththisformat.--include=(config|properties|tags)
              Control what kind of metadata is included in the output.

              config Output  configuration data stored in the database. Each line starts with "#@ ", followed by
                     a space separated key-value pair.  Both key and value are hex encoded if needed.

              properties
                     Output per-message (key,value) metadata.  Each line  starts  with  "#=  ",  followed  by  a
                     message  id,  and  a space separated list of key=value pairs.  Ids, keys and values are hex
                     encoded if needed.  See notmuch-properties for more details.

              tags   Output per-message boolean metadata, namely tags. See format above for description  of  the
                     output.

              The default is to include all available types of data.  The option can be specified multiple times
              to select some subset. As of version 3 of the dump format, there is a header line of the following
              form:

                 #notmuch-dump <*format*>:<*version*> <*included*>

              where <included> is a comma separated list of the above options.

       --output=<filename>
              Write output to given file instead of stdout.

       notmuch-dump - creates a plain-text dump of the tags of each message

notmuch,  notmuch-config,  notmuch-count, notmuch-hooks, notmuch-insert, notmuch-new, notmuch-properties,
       notmuch-reply, notmuch-restore, notmuch-search, notmuch-search-terms, notmuch-show, notmuch-tag

notmuchdump [--gzip] [--format=(batch-tag|sup)] [--output=<file>] [--] [<search-term> ...]