From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by arlo.cworth.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A95606DE028C for ; Sat, 9 Apr 2016 05:51:33 -0700 (PDT) X-Virus-Scanned: Debian amavisd-new at cworth.org X-Spam-Flag: NO X-Spam-Score: -0.019 X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.019 tagged_above=-999 required=5 tests=[AWL=-0.008, SPF_PASS=-0.001, T_RP_MATCHES_RCVD=-0.01] autolearn=disabled Received: from arlo.cworth.org ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (arlo.cworth.org [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with ESMTP id RCV11NpZYUlo for ; Sat, 9 Apr 2016 05:51:25 -0700 (PDT) Received: from fethera.tethera.net (fethera.tethera.net [198.245.60.197]) by arlo.cworth.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 999B86DE0173 for ; Sat, 9 Apr 2016 05:51:25 -0700 (PDT) Received: from remotemail by fethera.tethera.net with local (Exim 4.84) (envelope-from ) id 1aosMQ-0001Pd-2B; Sat, 09 Apr 2016 08:51:34 -0400 Received: (nullmailer pid 10475 invoked by uid 1000); Sat, 09 Apr 2016 12:51:22 -0000 From: David Bremner To: sfischme@uwaterloo.ca, Notmuch Mail Subject: Re: Search mail from people with different addresses and incorrectly configured clients In-Reply-To: <871t6fe9mq.fsf@uwaterloo.ca> References: <871t6fe9mq.fsf@uwaterloo.ca> User-Agent: Notmuch/0.21+99~gd93d377 (http://notmuchmail.org) Emacs/24.5.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) Date: Sat, 09 Apr 2016 09:51:22 -0300 Message-ID: <87y48n2bed.fsf@zancas.localnet> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain X-BeenThere: notmuch@notmuchmail.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.20 Precedence: list List-Id: "Use and development of the notmuch mail system." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 09 Apr 2016 12:51:33 -0000 Sebastian Fischmeister writes: > > Has anyone found a good way to use tags to aggregate emails from the > same person? Will it have some disadvantages? It sounds straightforward, > but the management of this would be quite an effort. > > The alternative is to create long search strings that encompass all > email addresses of the person. This has less management effort, but I > would need to somewhere store all email addresses associated with a person. It sounds like some variation on named queries [1] might help. It would still be a manual process to set up the aliases, but at least once it was done, it would work everywhere (e.g. command line, emacs client, python bindings). These would be prefixed with query:, so to search for you I'd use query:seb. I was thinking a little about having aliases for the other prefixes (in particular "to:", and "from:" since to:me and from:me are common requests). There would be some potential performance impact because the extra database lookup to expand the alias, and also some potential confusion. If I make an alias for to:bob, what if I actually want to search for the term bob? I guess we could invent some syntax to prevent alias expansion, but I'm not sure what's possible with current Xapian. [1]: id:1459015043-8460-1-git-send-email-david@tethera.net