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

[Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org>]

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On Wed, Oct 17 2018, Jeff Templon wrote:
> Indeed, as long as I am satisfied that all the messages in the view are
> OK to delete / tag / whatever ... I usually look at such at view to make
> sure that eg. the SPAM filter is doing the right thing.

I have not found any case in the notmuch-emacs UI where this has been an
issue for me, personally. If you do find a use case that's problematic,
let us know and we could certainly expand the interface to accommodate
that in some way.

Meanwhile, at the command line this distinction is made very clear. Try
each of these commands, for example:

	notmuch search some-search-pattern

	notmuch search --output threads some-search-pattern

        notmuch search --output messages some-search-pattern

The second and third options there are very appropriate for generating a
list of threads (or messages) that you could then iterate over and
perform operations on.

And of course, if you're wanting to do an operation such as tagging or
un-tagging, then you can do that at that command-line directly without
needing an external loop over the results:

	notmuch tag +some-tag some-search-pattern

	notmuch tag -some-tag some-search-pattern

Both of these operations will act on matched messages, (no threads are
involved).

So hopefully playing with the above operations makes it clear how
notmuch itself is operating.

And the notmuch-emacs stuff is a pretty simple layer on top of that, so
again, we could easily improve things as necessary.

> My opinion : the best option would be to have some flag / toggle
> variable / whatever that would cause a search results screen to display
> only matching messages and not the whole thread.

That would certainly be an option.

But again, what operation does notmuch-emacs allow you to do on the
thread that you are really only wanting to do on the matching messages?

For me, a frequent operation is to just _see_ the matching messages. And
for this particular operation, just pressing "Enter" on a thread does
exactly that. It brings up a view of the whole thread, but with only the
matching messages open (and non-matching messages collapsed).

-Carl



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