Hello. Disclaimer: I'm using vim, in combination with mutt for email, for years, but never dealt with emacs. Please have this in mind and spot any emacs user errors in this report. :) I have first seen notmuch several weeks ago as it seems a silent project. Being more then happy now that it envolves quickly and a real developer community builds around it. But now to my problem. Getting m mail indexed was easy enough: stefan@excalibur:~$ du -chs not-much-mail/ 1.5G not-much-mail/ 1.5G total stefan@excalibur:~$ time notmuch new Found 103677 total files. Processed 103677 total files in 42m 30s (40 files/sec.). Added 100899 new messages to the database (not much, really). Tip: If you have any sub-directories that are archives (that is, they will never receive new mail), marking these directories as read-only (chmod u-w /path/to/dir) will make "notmuch new" much more efficient (it won't even look in those directories). real 43m0.943s user 22m46.513s sys 0m39.418s I put (require 'notmuch) in my ~/.emacs ans start emacs with the -f notmuch option to enter the notmuch mode. What happends then is that a notmuch process gets started and emacs waits for the return. 23649 pts/1 SN+ 0:00 | \_ emacs -f notmuch 23651 ? RNs 0:03 | \_ /usr/local/bin/notmuch search --sort=oldest-first tag:inbox Sadly that takes around 25 minutes here on an Intel Core2Duo notbeook (Thinkpad X200s). I tried this several times now. CPU load was low (~10%) during this time so it is mostly IO bound. I checked that I don't have any big files like mutt header caches left and all my mail is stored in maildir format diretcly from offlineimap. I'm more then happy to test any patches on this issue or do some debugging myself if I get some hints where to look. regards Stefan Schmidt