Alternative to no longer supported folder:foo* wildcard matching ?

[David Bremner]

Jean-Marc Liotier <jm at liotier.org> writes:

>
> % cd ~/Maildir
> % mkdir .NM_myTopLevelFolder
> % ln -rs .myTopLevelFolder* -t .NM_myTopLevelFolder

This is doing one level of links. If you want more hierarchy
you'll have to create subdirectories with links to only some of your
folders. In fact the NM_myTopLevelFolder doesn't seem useful to me,
since you don't gain any new queries that way.

So if you have .foo.*  and .bar.*, I would

mkdir foo
ln -rs .foo.* -t foo
mkdir bar
ln -rs .bar.* -t bar

> On the downside:
> - It doubles the number of messages to index (though then even 
> multiplied by two, my 300k messages are Not Much Mail™ - but still...)

Conceivably this has to do with duplicating the top level folder, not
sure; I don't see an increase. In particular I don't see in increase in
the output of "notmuch count", so in notmuch jargon, the number of
_messages_ does not increase but rather the number of _files_. There
will obviously be some growth in the database size, but there was
nothing too shocking in my experiments (I didn't measure carefully, but
my database is still at around 30% of the raw mail size)

> - myTopLevelFolder gets a NM_myTopLevelFolder twin and restricting the 
> search scope to it requires using its twin's name

yes, I suppose that's true. But for "nice" symlink names this doesn't
seem so terrible. But *shrug* it's a matter of taste.

> - The additional messages are duplicates, so --remove-dups becomes 
> mandatory in any search query

Based on the name, I'd suspect "remove-dups" corresponds roughly to the
default behaviour of notmuch in reporting results.

> - This method is good for restricting the search scope to a directory,
> but not for excluding a directory from the search scope... Which alas
> is what I desire most...

Either I don't understand what you want, or this might again be
something to do with notmuch-mutt. For me, queries like

        notmuch count not 'path:list/**' 

and
        notmuch count not 'path:list/**' and from:bremner

work as expected.

Hope this helps,

d