finding incoming messages in threads in which i've participated [was: Re: find threads where I and Jian participated but not Dave]

[Jani Nikula]

On Sun, 25 Jun 2017, David Bremner <david at tethera.net> wrote:
> Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg at fifthhorseman.net> writes:
>
>>
>> For example, would it make sense to have "notmuch new" (and "notmuch
>> insert") do "thread-based propagation" of specific tags?  for example,
>> consider the following (i've just made up the config options):
>>
>>     notmuch config set new.from_self_tags participated
>>     notmuch config set new.propagate_thread_tags participated
>>
>> the idea is that "new.from_self_tags" would be applied by "notmuch new" or
>> "notmuch insert" if the message was explicitly from: user.primary_email
>> or user.other_email.
>
> At the moment I'm more inclined to work on "doing things right" by
> adding xapian documents (database items) for threads. Many of the ideas
> in this thread amount to working around their absence. OTOH, it's
> certainly true that this last idea (unlike some of the query ideas)
> would be relatively straightforward to impliment.

I admit I didn't thoroughly read the entire thread... but I think
there's an alternative to adding thread documents, with reasonable
design, to address the original problem in this thread.

Have a new prefix that evaluates to the threads of the sub-query passed
as the prefix value, say thread-of:<query> that you could use as part of
the query. (Or, make thread: work on queries as well as thread IDs.)

The original query in this thread becomes:

thread-of:"from:me" and thread-of:"from:jian" and not thread-of:"from:dave".

As a side effect, this also makes thread: queries portable across
databases via thread-of:"id:<message-id>".

I think this should be doable in current Xapian that supports custom
prefix handlers.

IIRC the idea was suggested by Austin ages ago.


BR,
Jani.