Searching for phrases in the body of an email

[Suvayu Ali]

Hi,

I'm trying to find those annoying emails which have useless plain text
parts.  As I recall, they had a phrase something along the lines of "not
available in plain text" or "no plain text".  So of course I searched
for "plain text".  But that returns hundreds of messages with no obvious
matches, I can't even find the phrase "plain text" in the body for most
of the results!

Here is an example:

$ notmuch search --limit=1 -- no NEAR "plain text"
thread:000000000000a2a6   Sat. 00:30 [1/1] NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory; NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover Tracks Sunspots (2015 2015-07 inbox)
$ notmuch show --format=raw -- thread:000000000000a2a6 | grep 'plain text'
$

To make this stranger, here are more numbers:

$ notmuch show -- $(notmuch search --output=messages -- no NEAR "plain text") | \
      grep -c -e 'plain text'
7
$ notmuch count -- no NEAR "plain text"
461

I do not understand this at all!  Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance,

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.