[notmuch] Tag search peculiarities

[Ben Gamari]

On Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:27:12 +0100, Sandra Snan <sandra.snan at handgranat.org> wrote:
> 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
> 
Eh? They are two separate notmuch invocations.

> > 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?
> 
Yeah, poor choice of words. After the two commands above ran, my mailing list
messages were tagged with new, inbox.

> 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.
> 
Eh? I fail to see why. It's no more risky than depending on the inbox 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”).
> 
I guess I should have been more explicit. I meant in notmuch itself, not the
clients.

> > 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.
> 
Indeed. Hopefully it will be something so simple. I'm currently blissfully
unaware of the internals of Xapian, and would really like to remain that way.

Thanks,

- Ben