A few years ago I installed Notmuch on my computer in order to keep an index of my mailbox. Though Notmuch is quite awesome, I didn't fully configure it until recently. As I eventually moved from Mutt to NeoMutt for its native Notmuch backend integration (and a bunch of other cool features too) I began to rely more on it.

As messages are indexed by Notmuch in term of messages and threads, one of many possible uses of this tool is its ability to retrieve an entire thread matching a criteria or including a given message.

One can integrate this use in Mutt using a wrapper named notmuch-mutt and declaring a macro similar to this:

macro index <F9> \
          "<enter-command>unset wait_key<enter><pipe-message>~/bin/mutt-notmuch thread<enter><change-folder-readonly>~/.cache/mutt_results<enter><enter-command>set wait_key<enter>" \
          "search and reconstruct owning thread (using notmuch)"

You can also find a more complete macro on the ArchLinux wiki page for Notmuch.

This approach does not convince me, as it works basically by emitting a Notmuch query from a Perl wrapper, saving the result in a temporary file and showing it back in Mutt.

As NeoMutt has a native support of Notmuch backend, we should be able to do the same thing without external wrapper. I noticed one function while reading the list of available functions: entire-thread. I quickly checked in the source code and it does what I want: it queries Notmuch to find the whole thread including the selected message and shows it back in NeoMutt.

However there's a little difference between these two implementations: the result is virtually injected in the current view instead of being put in a new dedicated vfolder. It can be confusing, but at least it does what I want and takes no time to do it. And you just need to reload the open folder when you want to get rid of the reconstructed threads.

Example of my INBOX folder before retrieving the entire thread of a GitHub notification:

Before

And after, still my unchanged INBOX folder:

After

I bound this function to the x key like this:

bind index,pager x entire-thread

Enjoy!