[notmuch] Tag search peculiarities

[Sandra Snan]

Hey, Ben.
Ben Gamari <bgamari.foss at gmail.com> wrote:
> notmuch tag -new tag:new and tag:list notmuch tag -new +inbox tag:new

Is there a new line between the calls? Like:
notmuch tag -new tag:new and tag:list # removes new from list
notmuch tag -new +inbox tag:new # replaces those that still are new with inbox

> However, I found that mailing list traffic was still getting through.

What do you mean by “through”? Do you mean that there still are
messages tagged both inbox and list? Even though you can’t search for
them?

If a message is tagged both inbox and list, but not new then the two
lines of your script that you posted so far wouldn’t change it, and it
would still bo both inbox and list.

It’s risky being so dependent on the new tag.

> After investigating further, I found that any query in the form of "tag:inbox
> and tag:$TAG" would return no results. Strangely, all other combinations of tag
> searches (i.e. "tag:lkml and tag:unread") seem to work just fine.
> 
> Has anyone else noticed this sort of behavior? Does the inbox tag have some
> special signifigance that I should know of?

Yes, many versions of the reading client (for example, the version of
notmuch.el that ships with the notmuch package in debian) remove the
inbox tag from messages once you scroll past them or when you press
the key that’s bound to notmuch-show-archive-thread (default is “a”).

> Is my index just FUBAR? (the ladder would be very strange
> considering it's only a few days old and I can't think of any
> crashes, etc. that might have corrupted it) Any ideas for debugging?

Add the tags manually to a few messages, search for them again, and be
sure to not run your tagging script while looking at this problem.

Michal’s tip, looking at a few lines of notmuch dump, is a good idea
too. Notmuch dump is fast, so don’t be afraid (notmuch restore on the
other hand… but even that completes fast enough.)

I’ve often been surprised at weird tag situations then realized that
it was old versions of my own scripts that had ran in the background
and I’ve forgotten about it.

Boolean algebra and set theory is tricky stuff! Good luck.

Sandra