The archive operation should only archive open messages

Carl Worth cworth at cworth.org
Thu Apr 15 13:41:17 PDT 2010


One of the searches that I use most frequently, (for mail that I want to
respond to on a fairly timely basis), is

	tag:inbox and tag:to-me		[*]

Sometimes, this search will show a large mailing-list thread with only a
few messages open. Perhaps part-way through the thread, someone started
to CC me. Or perhaps my address got dropped from the CC at some
point. Either way, I am presented with a subset of the messages from the
thread, even though all of the thread's messages are in my inbox still.

That much is just fine. I'm giving priority to messages where people
thought I would be particularly interested, and that's just as it should
be.

A bad bug occurs when paging through the thread with the space
bar. After showing me these few messages, it will then proceed to
archive *all* the messages in the thread (not only those it showed
me). And I'm likely to be unaware of this since the closed (but not yet
archived) messages are not easily distinguished from messages that were
previously closed and archived.

Some people will claim (and I've even agreed) that the space bar is too
magic. But this bug also happens with an explicit command to archive the
current thread (such as hitting 'a').

I think the fix is to change these commands to only archive the messages
that are currently open. That will make these operations behave as I
expect, and I don't think will cause any unexpected or confusing
behavior. But please let me know if you disagree.

-Carl

[*] My tag:to-me is set by a script doing "notmuch tag +to-me
to:cworth at cworth.org or to:carl.d.worth at intel.com ...". I'd prefer this
to be a saved-search of course---that's one of the patches I haven't had
a chance to review yet.
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