find threads where I and Jian participated but not Dave

[David Bremner]

Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg at fifthhorseman.net> writes:

>
> 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.

At the moment the best we could do is essentially the same algorithm,
but in C instead of shell / python. Threads are not documents in the
database, so they can't efficiently be searched for.  Of course we could
change that, but those kind of changes take a fair amount of effort, and
some careful design work.

d