Understanding the "replied" tag

[Xu Wang]

Dear Suvayu and Austin,

Thank you for your attempts to understand my goals. I apologize for
the lack in the clarity of my previous messages. Thank you kindly for
your persistence and thank you to Suvayu for suggestions on adding
more information.

I am indeed using mutt-kz, along with offlineimap, on Ubuntu 15.04. I
have written the following information the other email thread I
started (perhaps I should have added it as a reply here, but I thought
it might be sufficiently a different topic). I will copy the
information I gave there on my goal here:

My goal is to do something like the following:
notmuch search tag:reply-required and not tag:replied

which was discussed here:
http://notmuchmail.org/pipermail/notmuch/2010/002558.html

However, instead of conditioning on tag:reply-required, I would like
to look at this for a specific message. For example, if I write an
important message, I can do the following:
save the message id, and then in 5 days set a cron script to check
whether my message was responded to. If it was not responded to I will
take some action to notify myself (haven't decided what yet).
It is the "If it was not responded to" part that this email thread is
about. I am now realizing that I cannot use mutt's tag "replied"
because I often send and read email from gmail or other IMap clients
(e.g. phone). Because of this (I believe), the reply tag does not get
set when it should (well not "should" but rather "when I want it to").
For example, I often have

abc
->def
  -> ghi

where the message def does not have the "replied" tag, even though it
was replied to (ghi replied to it). I think the reason is what I
suggested above. Yes, indeed Austin was correct about where my
misunderstanding was. I do indeed want to see if *any* reply was to a
certain message id, but the "replied" tag is apparently for my own
replying.

Because I cannot use the "replied" tag (unless I have misunderstood),
I thought I could just check using the message id with 'notmuch search
repliedto:<messageid>', but Suvayu points out that searching for this
is not supported.

Kind regards,

Xu

On Sat, Jun 13, 2015 at 7:12 PM, Austin Clements
<aclements at csail.mit.edu> wrote:
> Hi Xu. I may be misunderstanding your email, but it sounds like you want to know if a message has *any* reply message. That's not what the replied tag indicates. The replied tag indicates that *you* have sent a reply to a message. Mechanically, when you hit, say, r to start a reply and then send that message, notmuch tags the message you hit r on as "replied". That's the only time notmuch automatically sets this tag.
>
> On June 11, 2015 10:25:44 AM PDT, Xu Wang <xuwang762 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>Dear all,
>>
>>First, I am extremely excited to be a part of this list now. notmuch
>>has really helped me. Thank you go all individuals working to improve
>>it and to help others to know how to use it.
>>
>>I would really like to know if a message has been replied to (e.g.
>>using a certain message id). It seems that all I need to do is check
>>for the "replied" tag. But often this tag is not there, even when
>>there has been a reply (I have confirmed this through the thread
>>display and checking the message that replied to the message to make
>>sure it indeed has header "replied-to:<MSG-ID>").
>>
>>I have looked in mutt, and also I see many situations where there is
>>no 'r' flag, especially for emails sent from me.
>>
>>The following returns true:
>>notmuch config get maildir.synchronize_flags
>>
>>So at least both are giving same answer, but I'm not sure why not
>>saying "replied" thread is correct.
>>
>>What is incorrect for my way of thinking about "replied"? Do I
>>misunderstand what it is supposed to do or am I not updating the flags
>>correctly?
>>
>>Kind regards,
>>
>>Xu
>>_______________________________________________
>>notmuch mailing list
>>notmuch at notmuchmail.org
>>http://notmuchmail.org/mailman/listinfo/notmuch
>