what is the concept of archiving?

[Jani Nikula]

On Thu, Nov 9, 2017 at 11:56 AM, Linus Arver <linusarver at gmail.com> wrote:
> Unfortunately, I cannot find enough information online about what any of
> these functions do, or what the concept of "archiving" means. From
> reading some of the sources in notmuch-tree.el I found out that
> archiving a message results in "applying the tag changes in
> `notmuch-archive-tags' to it" but I am not sure what this means.

Archiving, by default, simply means removing the inbox tag, either
from a single message or from all messages in a thread. You can use
notmuch-archive-tags to configure the tag change actions if you like.

> I found out that the key bindings are in that same file, which assigns
> "a" to notmuch-tree-archive-message-then-next; when I press "a" in my
> inbox view (all messages tagged "inbox"), it appears to just remove the
> "inbox" tag. I have some questions:
>
> (1) What is the point of archiving (what problem does it solve)?

Remove the messages from your inbox search. (At least I prefer to keep
this distinct from removing the unread tag; I archive tons of messages
without reading, and I have some messages with inbox tag that I've
already read.)

> (2) Do any other things happen to such archived messages, apart from the
> tag being removed?

No. Optionally, you can configure notmuch-archive-tags to remove more
or other tags, or add tags.

> (3) How do I un-archive these messages, if I press the "a" key by
> accident?

Find the message, hit "k k a". ("k" enters a submenu for doing
customizable tagging operations quickly, "k k" does the reverse
operation.)

BR,
Jani.