"snoozing" with notmuch?

[Matt Armstrong]

My mail yesterday about muting
(id:qf5vazjjciq.fsf at marmstrong-linux.kir.corp.google.com) was in part
motivated by this question:

Has anybody implemented something like "snooze" in notmuch?

I think of a "snooze" as a temporary mute.

The intent would be to hide messages from the inbox until some future
time, upon which they are automatically promoted back into the inbox.

A more precise spec:

 - if a new message arrives into a "snoozed" thread it too is snoozed
   and is not tagged 'inbox'.

 - (perhaps optinoally) unless it is "to me", which always
   auto-unsnoozes the threads it is part of.

 - when unsnoozed, or when a snooze expires, messages in the thread are
   tagged with inbox.

The difficulty I have is that notmuch doesn't support tags with
timestamps or numerical values.  It might be possible to snooze based on
fixed intervals.  E.g. one unique "snoozed until" tag per day of the
year.  Using this would require some UI facade.


Prior art that I'm aware of:

a) Google Inbox has snooze.  You choose a time and the thread appears in
   your inbox as "new mail", as if it arrived then.  It appears to be
   implemented as a tag on the thread that suppresses message display by
   the client (e.g. if you view your "Google Inbox" mail in Gmail the
   "snoozed" messages appear there as normal).

b) in a past life I filtered low priority mail into hourly and daily
   temporary mailboxes, and had cron entries set up to re-incorporate
   those as incoming mail on an hourly/daily basis.  This was a great
   way to encourage myself to batch-process less important mail.