Re: web interface to notmuch

Subject: Re: web interface to notmuch

Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2017 11:01:53 -0400

To: Matthew Lear, notmuch@notmuchmail.org

Cc:

From: Brian Sniffen


I put together something like this, visible at
https://github.com/briansniffen/notmuch/tree/nmweb/contrib/notmuch-web

It's not much of a service.  I am pretty sure it is exploitable---that
content in text/html parts of messages can do Bad Things to your
session.

I haven't thought nearly hard enough about how it will deal with
multiple users.

But it's < 250 lines of Python, so perhaps you can adapt it to what you
need.  It uses web.py, so you *could* run it standalone, but you'll
probably be happier with Apache or nginx or something in front of it,
handling TLS termination and that sort of thing.

It's only approach to sending mail is generating mailto: links that will
open in whatever client the user has configured.

-Brian

Matthew Lear <matt@bubblegen.co.uk> writes:

> Hello all. A little side project at work involves me trying to put together
> part of a knowledge share system where users can query and search email
> stored and indexed centrally (by offlineimap & notmuch). My intention is to
> provide a means to support multiple concurrent read-only accesses to the
> notmuch database from users' web browsers so they can query and search mail.
>
> Consider a few different email addresses being plugged into various
> systems, all receiving email on different topics. I'd like to build an
> application which presents a web frontend which I can run on the server
> which fetches and indexes the mail, and thus present a web interface to
> search all mail using notmuch.
>
> notmuch-web has not seen much development for a few years.
> noservice looks pretty nifty but I'm a little unsure of the status and if
> it's missing anything fundamental.
>
> I think my requirements are pretty basic:
>
> * Read-only access
> * Search and display mail only (no sending), including html mails
> * Freeform entry of search terms in accordance with notmuch-search-terms(7).
>
> Would anybody have any ideas about the best way to undertake such a project?
>
> notmuch-web and noservice definitively look like they could be leveraged,
> but I don't know if I'd be better trying to construct something from the
> ground up which is better suited / tailored to my requirements (which are
> much less than either of the above were intended to fulfil).
>
> A standalone app would be preferred rather than having to rely on a web
> server, although I'm not picky about infrastructure. Web based programming
> is not my forte so I'd appreciate any feedback relating also to
> implementation, currently available open source web frameworks which could
> be used / considered / leveraged, etc.
>
> Many thanks,
> --  Matt
> _______________________________________________
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> notmuch@notmuchmail.org
> https://notmuchmail.org/mailman/listinfo/notmuch
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