dm-list-email-notm...@scs.stanford.edu writes: > First, thanks for the response. The responsiveness and friendliness of > the notmuch mailing list goes a long way towards compensating for any > missing features / customizability one might want.
I'm delighted to hear that the notmuch community maintains such a
helpful and friendly atmosphere.
> However, currently it seems strange that there are *two* different
> search terms (folder and path), and that neither one lets you search for
> a portion of your folder name.
For what it's worth, I totally agree. I'm guilty as far as sitting out
of the detailed design discussions, (I don't use any sort of
folder-based searching, so I don't care too much). I was aware of the
problems of the original "folder:" code I wrote, and I was happy to hear
that people were addressing those problems.
But it's terribly strange to me that notmuch now has two different
search terms that overlap so much in functionality. I know that I will
never trust myself to be able to distinguish/describe the folder:
vs. path: semantics without consulting the documentation. And that's
discouraging.
I think the original "folder:" shortcomings could have been addressed
without adding two terms, and also without losing some functionality,
(as shown in David's use case).
I would have liked to have seen some explicit syntax for anchoring the
beginning and end of the directory name, (which could have then been
re-used for anchoring subject: or even some future header: prefix).
> First, are there people out there who do not use a collection of maildir
> directories, with all mail in cur and new?
When I started notmuch, my entire mail archive was in non-maildir
directories. Since then, the bulk of my mail has been converted to
maildir (by accident more than anything). But I still do create
non-maildir directories for mail occasionally.
One use case for this is when someone forwards me an email (or a thread
of emails) to demonstrate a bug in notmuch. In a case like this, I will
do something like:
mkdir ~/mail/dm-folder-bug-2014-05
and then copy the mail files into that directory. I see no benefit nor
point to creating "cur" and "new" directories in a case like this.
> If not, why does notmuch try to find mail in non-mail-directories, and
> why do you need search terms differentiating new and cur?
I've always thought that the "cur" and "new" directories were somewhere
on the spectrum between pointless and annoying. The idea with the
original "folder:" indexing was to implicitly ignore these, (when both
existed).
It seems that the new "folder:" continues this idea, while the new
"path:" does not. Meanwhile, the new "folder:" anchors the search to the
beginning of the directory, while "path:" does not. And finally, "path:"
adds a magic syntax to do hierarchical matching while "folder:" does
not.
That's an odd hodgepodge of non-orthogonal distinction in functionality.
> Conversely, I find it particularly weird that there's no convenient
> way to say "stop trying to index stuff that isn't in a maildir (cur or
> new)." You can do the inverse and blacklist files, but then I end up
> with stuff like this in my .notmuch-config:
Like I said, I started with an assumption of a hierarchy of directories
containing nothing but mail files, (that's exactly what I had at the
time).
>
> ignore=dovecot-keywords;dovecot-uidlist;dovecot-uidvalidity;dovecot.index;dovecot.index.cache;dovecot.index.log;dovecot.index.log.2;dovecot.index.search;dovecot.index.search.uids;maildirfolder;
I really do like explicitly describing the things you want to
ignore. One of the worst things that notmuch could do is to silently
fail to index legitimate emails. So I would not be in favor of features
that made that easier.
So the above looks fairly reasonable to me. Though it would also be
reasonable to allow for some wildcards there so that you could have
simply:
ignore=dovecot*;maildirfolder;
> Second, does anyone out there have a collection with more than a few
> thousand maildirs?
I certainly don't. I have just short of one million messages, but only
841 directories in my mail store. And since that's counting ".",
"./tmp", "./cur", and "./new" for every maildir, I probably only have
about 200 maildirs.
-Carl
--
carl.d.wo...@intel.com
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