[notmuch] tag dir proposal [was: Re: Git as notmuch object store]

[Jameson Rollins]

On Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:22:47 -0500 (EST), Mike Kelly <pioto at pioto.org> wrote:
>   Similarly, provide a mechanism for correlating the folder name with
>   some set of tags, and change those tags as messages are moved around.  
> 
> For example, I might have:
> 
> ~/.notmuch-config:
> 
>     [database]
>     path=/home/pioto/mail
>     ...
>     [tags]
>     pioto at pioto.org/INBOX.ListMail.notmuch = notmuch
> 
> So, a 'tags' section, where each key is the folder name, relative to the
> db path, and the value is one or more tag names

I think this idea is a really good one and I would like to pursue it as
a tangent thread here.  I was going to propose something very similar to
this.  I think it's a very flexible idea that would help in a lot of
ways.

For instance, notmuch emacs (and emacs message-mode) is currently not
good at handling sent mail.  At the moment mail is just Bcc'd to
yourself.  However, this means that these sent messages end up back in
your inbox with 'inbox' and 'unread' tags which then need to be removed
so that the sent message is archived.  If one could configure notmuch
such that only new mail in an inbox directory would be tagged with
'inbox' and 'unread', and manage to coax emacs to fcc directly into an
archive, then these sent messages would not have the problematic 'inbox'
and 'unread' tags.  Even better, then sent mail could be fcc'd to a sent
mail directory would could then be configured to automatically get a
'sent' tag.

Notmuch emacs also currently does not handle message drafts, which makes
it very difficult to resume messages that were postponed from a previous
session.  If notmuch could be configured to tag messages in the
message-mode "message-auto-save-directory" with a 'draft' tag, then it
would greatly facilitate finding draft messages.

It would also be sweet if this could remove tags as well (maybe be
prepending '-' or '+' to the tag specification.  For example, I can
imagine implementing the above examples like this:

[database]
path=/home/jrollins/.mail

[tags]
inbox = +inbox,+unread
sent = +sent
drafts = +draft
archive = -inbox

I think we should definitely implement something like this.  It would
make things a lot more flexible.  Notmuch could be configured to not tag
any messages by default (which would make a lot of people using notmuch
for other backends happier) and then notmuch setup could could provide
an example tags stanza that would tag new messages with 'inbox' and
'unread' (maybe with a wildcard that would replicate the current
behavior):

[tags]
* = +inbox,+unread

I would love to see this.  Hopefully we can rally some more support for
this idea.

jamie.
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