Mail to self

[Gregor Zattler]

Hi Leo, notmuch users and developers,

I too filter emails into different folders.  And I used to filter
some emails in several folders in order to find them in different
contexts. 

* Leo Gaspard <notmuchmail.org at leo.gaspard.io> [2018-10-28; 16:31]:
> I can confirm this is my issue. My thinking is that if any file does not
> have the ,S maildir flag, then I would prefer the mail to be marked as
> unread, as a read mail that is spuriously marked as unread is a small
> inconvenience, while an unread mail that is spuriously marked as read
> can have huge consequences.

For me, when I filtered emails in several folders and read them
with mutt (1) it was the other way around: I wished for the
possibility to mark them as read in all folders if read in one.

I think your reasoning is also sound but only iff tags would
belong to files, but they belong to messages.

> Actually, I just noticed while writing this mail that I had setup a
> sieve filter for duplicate email that put them in a "Duplicate" folder
> and automatically marks them as "read", so that at the same time they
> wouldn't bother me in the thunderbird interface but I could still check
> dovecot's duplicate detection didn't have false positives.
>
> This behaviour of notmuch thus made me miss 9 emails in the 2 weeks I've
> been using it, the oldest being 12 days ago, without any warning. Well,
> now I know about it and can try to change my setup (except I can't
> really touch this sieve filter as other people rely on it), but...

But why would you tag a message (as opposed to a file) as
"unread" because it's a duplicate?

If it's somehow important to you to know that a certain email
your read via notmuch is a duplicate, why not tag it as
"duplicate" instead?

I suppose you do this filtering in case you read those emails
with a file/folders based client.  But would you actually "read"
emails in a duplicate folder?  I too have a duplicate folder and
it was useful some times in order to investigate problems with my
processing of incoming emails, but I do not read them in order to
understand the meaning of some message a human sent me.

Since I also filter emails in folders my searches heavily relay
on the path the message is in with the "path:" search prefix.
These is true for all mailing lists, for instance.

For the specific case of the duplicates folder: It's simply not
in the same maildir notmuch indexes and therefore there is no
issue with them for me.  My procmail scripts first do a backup of
an incoming email, later they filter duplicates in a duplicates
folder and when an email actually is delivered in the maildir
hierarchy notmuch indexes, then it is also backed up in a third
backup folder for post-processed emails.  These three special
folders are directories under my ~/.procmail directory and are
not indexed by notmuch.


HTH, Gregor
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