Sorting and attachments

Sorting and attachments

[mueen]

Hi,

1. Can notmuch return results sorted by size?

2. Can I tell notmuch to limit the items it returns (e.g. show me first
ten messages matching  ... )

3. Any plans for searching via attachment size or type? Say I want all
emails with attachments bigger than 1 MB. 

Essentially, I have a tendency to prune off large attachments so that my
mail directory doesn't blow up...

Thanks.



 

Re: Sorting and attachments

[Jameson Graef Rollins]

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On Sat, 26 Mar 2011 21:53:49 -0700, mueen@nawaz.org wrote:
> 1. Can notmuch return results sorted by size?

As far as I know, there is currently no way to do that (but see below).

> 2. Can I tell notmuch to limit the items it returns (e.g. show me
> first ten messages matching ... )

Are you looking for this in the emacs UI?  The following works for me on
the command line:

notmuch search '*' | head -10

> 3. Any plans for searching via attachment size or type? Say I want all
> emails with attachments bigger than 1 MB.

You can currently search through attachments with the 'attachment:'
search term.  See "notmuch help search-terms" for more info.  This works
for searching for mime types.  I don't know of a way to search by size,
though.

> Essentially, I have a tendency to prune off large attachments so that
> my mail directory doesn't blow up...

You might just try using find, which is very useful for this kind of
thing:

find $MAILDIR -printf '%b %p\n' | sort -n

hth.

jamie.

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Re: Sorting and attachments

[mueen]

Jameson Graef Rollins
<jrollins@finestructure.net> writes:

> On Sat, 26 Mar 2011 21:53:49 -0700, mueen@nawaz.org wrote:
>> 1. Can notmuch return results sorted by size?
>
> As far as I know, there is currently no way to do that (but see below).

It would be really convenient. Would this be a challenging task?

>> 2. Can I tell notmuch to limit the items it returns (e.g. show me
>> first ten messages matching ... )
>
> Are you looking for this in the emacs UI?  The following works for me on
> the command line:
>
> notmuch search '*' | head -10

Well, yes - I was thinking of the Emacs UI. I suppose I could just hack
the .el files, but my knowledge of eLisp is fairly poor.

>> 3. Any plans for searching via attachment size or type? Say I want all
>> emails with attachments bigger than 1 MB.
>
> You can currently search through attachments with the 'attachment:'
> search term.  See "notmuch help search-terms" for more info.  This works
> for searching for mime types.  I don't know of a way to search by size,
> though.

Again, that would be really convenient. I don't know if it would be
challenging. though.

>> Essentially, I have a tendency to prune off large attachments so that
>> my mail directory doesn't blow up...
>
> You might just try using find, which is very useful for this kind of
> thing:
>
> find $MAILDIR -printf '%b %p\n' | sort -n

Well, I would want to exclude certain tags in the query...

In my current mutt workflow, I'm a lot more aggressive. Once I'm done
looking at a (binary) attachment, I actively save or delete it. Then
every few months I just tell mutt to sort by size and delete any
attachments I may have missed. 

I don't expect the exact same workflow with notmuch, but I was trying to
find some way to handle this.