Re: (auto-)tagging sent messages

[Jameson Graef Rollins <jrollins@finestructure.net>]

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On Sat, 16 Apr 2011 14:57:07 +0200, Pieter Praet <pieter@praet.org> wrote:
> > Further, for certain mails I sent (like this one ) I would like a
> > WAITING tag (or similar) in order to indicate that I am waiting for an
> > answer. Currently I set this manually. Could this be achieved through
> > some indicators via message mode or similar means? e.g.:
> > 
> > <#notmuch tag=WAITING> analog to <#secure method=pgpmime mode=sign>
> 
> No idea how this works since I don't follow Jameson's crypto branch,
> but it's probably not a good idea for this use case since (I presume)
> the indicator will become permanently lodged in the content of the
> mail, which isn't where highly volatile metadata belongs.

Hey, Pieter.  This doesn't actually have anything to do with the crypto
branch.  These indicators are how emacs handles signing/encryption of
outgoing messages in emacs message-mode, as well as other things like
adding attachments.  It's not actually a part of notmuch.

When using emacs message-mode to compose a message, you can add tags
like these to the message body.  When you then tell emacs to send the
message, emacs reads these tags and performs the specified operation,
like signing the message or adding an attachment.  Emacs then removes
the tags so they're never actually stored in the message.  These tags
are also not interpreted when reading a message, only when composing.

I don't think it's a bad idea to extend this system to benefit notmuch,
by instructing emacs message mode to add tags to outgoing messages.
Like someone suggested, though, it should really be done by having
notmuch index the outgoing message at the time of sending, which would
best be handled by telling notmuch to index an individual message.

Having notmuch index a single message would I think be incredibly
useful, for a lot of different reasons.  I think it would enable a lot
of nice integration with other mail handling tools.  I can imagine this
being done in a couple of ways:

By giving "notmuch new" a path to a message in the store:

  notmuch new /path/to/message

By feeding "notmuch new" a message on stdin, and then having it write
the message to a specified location:

  notmuch new /path/to/maildir <message

You could then add the ability to add tags at the time of index:

  notmuch new +foo +bar /path/to/message

I really think it would not be hard to enable notmuch to do this.  I
wonder what other things.  I think it would make things much easier for
interaction with procmail and spam filters.

jamie.

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