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From: David Bremner <david@tethera.net>
To: Kevin Foley <kevin@kevinjfoley.me>, notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Subject: Re: Searching for an Exact Email Address
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References: <m2wo960zey.fsf@Kevins-MBP.home.lan>
Date: Sat, 01 Feb 2020 20:38:32 -0400
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Kevin Foley <kevin@kevinjfoley.me> writes:

> Hi,
>
> I'm getting unexpected results when trying to search for messages
> associated with an email address.
>
> An example search is:
>
> $ notmuch search to:"example@email.com"

See the subsection Quoting in notmuch-search-terms(7). I suspect you
need to double-quote your query, as the examples in the documentation are.

>
> which is returning messages that seem to have nothing to do with the
> address I'm looking for.
>
> My understanding is this should be treated as a phrase which means that
> exact phrase will be searched for, is this correct?  If not is there a
> way to search for an exact email address in the to field?
>

You can also do regex searches, although they are are measurably
slower. The syntax is also discussed in notmuch-search-terms(7).