Handling of symlinked maildirs?

[Jameson Graef Rollins]

On Mon, Apr 02 2012, Andrei POPESCU <andreimpopescu at gmail.com> wrote:
> Im sorting my mailing lists with generic maildrop rules like this one:
>
>     if (/^List-Id:.*<debian-(.*)\.lists.debian.org>/)
>         to Maildir/.debian.$MATCH1/
>
> However, I'm subscribed to a *lot* of mailing lists and in order to keep 
> my folder view sane I use symlinks to conflate some of them, e.g. 
>
> .debian.devel-announce -> .debian.devel
>
> This works well since mutt simply ignores the symlink(s) so I don't even 
> need to exclude them in the config, but it seems that notmuch does index 
> each of the symlinks as a separate folder[1].
>
> Does it make sense to have this configurable or even completely exclude 
> the symlinks?

Hey, Andrei.  I would say that if you have a compelling reason that
notmuch should be able to ignore symlinked directories then it maybe
makes sense to have it configurable.  However, I must say that I have
completely dropped the whole folder concept myself since I find it
totally redundant with notmuch's tagging and searching capabilities.

> On a somewhat related note, unless I'm missing something, notmuch is 
> currently indexing only a few header fields, not including List-Id, and 
> there is no way to add custom fields. Am I correct?
>
> The reason I'm asking is that in theory one could completely drop any 
> sorting (just drop all mail in one folder) and use something like 
> 'list-id: debian-devel' instead.

Unfortunately notmuch does only index a limited subset of headers
(pretty much just the "primary" ones).  There has been a desire to be
able to index arbitrary headers for a long time now (and List-Id: has
been one of the oft-cited missing headers).  It would certainly improve
the search interface if we could.

Unfortunately no one has yet got around to coding it up.  I don't think
there are any fundamental impediments, it will just take a bit of work.

In the mean time, I wonder if it makes sense to just add List-Id to the
list of headers that we do index?  I think that would be a pretty simple
change, and I think a lot of folks would benefit.

jamie.
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