in testing out notmuch on a new user account, i just noticed that bringing up notmuch mode in emacs chokes with an unhelpful error for users who have never run "notmuch setup". it seems like there ought to be a way for the emacs mode to detect this error state and prompt the user to walk through "notmuch setup" directly from within emacs. my emacs-fu (and my time) is too limited for me to try to implement this bit of user-friendliness, but i just wanted to put the idea out there for folks who might want to take it on as a well-scoped project. At the very least, the error message could say "please run 'notmuch setup' from a shell". The current behavior (notmuch and notmuch-emacs 0.16-1 on debian) is to open a *notmuch-hello* buffer that says : Welcome to notmuch. You have And in the minibuffer, a message says "notmuch exited with status 1" *Messages* shows: process-lines: notmuch exited with status 1 --dkg