How to list archived mails

How to list archived mails

[Aneesh Kumar K.V]

Hi,

Once i mark the mail as archived how do i search for them ?
Right now with notmuch.el i am adding a tag "archive" when
i am archiving the mail. I am just wondering is this the right
way ?

-aneesh

Re: How to list archived mails

[Carl Worth]

On Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:35:26 +0530, aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com (Aneesh Kumar K.V) wrote:
> Once i mark the mail as archived how do i search for them ?
> Right now with notmuch.el i am adding a tag "archive" when
> i am archiving the mail. I am just wondering is this the right
> way ?

You might expect to be able to find all archived messages with:

	notmuch search not tag:inbox

(And if I had written the query parser that would work fine.)

But oddly, that fails because in Xapian's query parser the NOT operator
is not a unary operator but is instead a binary operator of AND_NOT.

I think the lack of a unary not is a bug in Xapian. In the meantime,
what we could use here is some syntax for a query that is guaranteed to
match all messages. Anyone have any ideas?

Meanwhile, if it's not that you're trying to list all archived messages,
(which I think would be a rare thing to want), but instead you want all
archived messages matching <some-term> then you can simply do:

	notmuch search <some-term> and not tag:inbox

I hope that helps.

Happy hacking,

-Carl

Re: How to list archived mails

[Carl Worth]

On Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:38:01 +0100, Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:35:26 +0530, aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com (Aneesh Kumar K.V) wrote:
> > Once i mark the mail as archived how do i search for them ?
> > Right now with notmuch.el i am adding a tag "archive" when
> > i am archiving the mail. I am just wondering is this the right
> > way ?
> 
> You might expect to be able to find all archived messages with:
> 
> 	notmuch search not tag:inbox

And now you can ignore everything else I said after this.

Adrian Perez just discovered that we just weren't enabling an option in
Xapian to allow this syntax to work. His commit is pushed, so now if you
update your source *can* you use the above syntax and it should work
just fine.

Happy hacking,

-Carl