Searching for phrases in the body of an email

[Suvayu Ali]

Hi Lewis,

On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 10:48:57AM -0500, J. Lewis Muir wrote:
> 
> 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.

True, but my puzzlement is notmuch shouldn't return those results in the
first place, since I provided a quoted string: "plain text", unless of
course I need to escape the quotes.  Okay, just checked it, doesn't make
a difference in the number of hits from notmuch.

> 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.

This is possible, but I use mutt.  As far as I know, it doesn't do
"smart" things like that.  I also recall looking at the mime parts
individually as I was surprised at the behaviour, and it was indeed a
useless text/plain part with that message.

> 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.

Good point, I tried grepping for this instead: 'plain[[:space:]/]+text',
no luck.

Thanks for your comments.

Cheers,

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.