find threads where I and Jian participated but not Dave

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On Tue 2017-06-13 20:31:19 -0300, David Bremner wrote:
> Xu Wang <xuwang762 at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I bump this. Actually more simple than that, how to search for thread
>> in which I have participated and Jian has participated? Excluding
>> threads in which Dave participated is perhaps more complicated.
>
> I don't know of an efficient way to do this. You could write a script
> something like
>
> notmuch search --output=threads from:Xu  > A
> notmuch search --output=threads from:Jian  > B
> comm -12 A B
>
> I think the output is sorted, but you might also have to sort A and B

that said, it'd be really nice to have something like this in notmuch
core.

One of my long-standing wishes is to be able to say "show me mails in my
inbox from people who have replied to messages i've sent them".

This could be re-framed as "show me threads in which i've participated,
where there are some messages flagged with 'inbox'".  but generating a
huge list of all threads in which i've participated, just to be able to
do an intersection operation with a (much smaller) list of all threads
that have a message with the inbox flag seems like a pretty gross
inefficiency.

     --dkg
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 832 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://notmuchmail.org/pipermail/notmuch/attachments/20170615/c997ff46/attachment.sig>