Searching for phrases in the body of an email

[Xu Wang]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2015 at 5:11 AM, Suvayu Ali <fatkasuvayu+linux at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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

Hi Suvayu,

First note that I believe notmuch search is case insensitive by
default, so your grep should be case insensitive as well.

More importantly, I'm not sure how 'no NEAR "plain text" ' syntax is
parsed. Maybe it is parsed as {no NEAR plain} or {text}.

You would like to search for the exact phrase, correct? How about the
following?

notmuch search no adj plain adj text

Best,

Xu