Searching for phrases in the body of an email

[J. Lewis Muir]

On 7/17/15 7:11 AM, Suvayu Ali wrote:
> 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!

[snip]

> I do not understand this at all!  Any thoughts?

Hello, Suvayu.

I can't speak to the notmuch search results since I actually don't have
experience with it (I'm planning to switch my email setup to using
notmuch, but I actually haven't switched yet!), but I can give a few
ideas for some of your puzzlements:

1. Perhaps you are remembering the "no plain text" message incorrectly?
   For example, the message could have referred to "text/plain" or
   "plaintext" (no space).  These would be sufficiently different to not
   match your grep pattern.

2. Perhaps your email client rendered the "no plain text" message when
   it encountered an email with only a "text/html" content type?  In
   this case, the "no plain text" (or whatever) message would not be
   present in the email itself since it would be generated by the email
   client when rendering the email.

3. A really long shot, but could a line wrap have occurred after "plain"
   such that "text" appeared on the next line?  Your grep pattern would
   not match that.

Regards,

Lewis