tell me how to do this (mass tagging of messages)

[Keith Amidon]

On 10/18/18 1:37 AM, Jeff Templon wrote:
> I guess the point for me is that I frequently search for messages (and
> not threads), and when I do so, it's easy for me to forget that actions
> taken on the results buffer not only apply to those messages, they can
> apply to all messages in threads that happen to contain a matched
> message.

I'm very late to this thread, and ironically not using notmuch to send 
this reply, but I have an additional suggestions to support this use 
case that may still be useful to Jeff or anyone who might find this 
thread through a search of the list archive.

I too frequently search for specific messages, but I use the package 
counsel-notmuch[1] (which was inspired by helm-notmuch[2]) for this 
task. This is relevant to this thread because these packages present a 
view of matching *messages* that updates as you type your query. When 
you select one of the message they take you directly to the selected 
message in notmuch-show-mode instead of the list of threads with 
matching messages in notmuch-search-mode that a regular notmuch search 
does (which is also very useful, but is the less common workflow for 
me). Tagging actions, etc. are then naturally applied to the specific 
message, though I will say that since search works so well this way, I 
use tags fairly infrequently.

Neither project page for these packages makes any attempt to convey how 
awesome it feels to have a filter-as-you-type experience for plucking 
exactly the message from 2 years ago that you're looking for from your 
mail archive with a few seconds of typing, or the looks of incredulity 
you receive from anyone who sees you do it.

And of course, it's all notmuch under the hood making this happen. 
Notmuch is just *awesome*.  :-)

--- Keith

[1] https://github.com/fuxialexander/counsel-notmuch
[2] https://github.com/xuchunyang/helm-notmuch