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

[Jeff Templon <templon@nikhef.nl>]

Hi Carl,

Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org> writes:

> 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.

Thanks for those examples, that does help.

> 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?

I wish I had made some screenshots of what happened last night - I can't
reproduce the steps involved, but what happened was that some message
got tagged in some unhelpful way (which is a solvable problem, that's
not the point) - the point was that I did some operation that was meant
to remove that "bad tag" and flag it as "inbox" to deal with later, and
what happened was that all the messages in the whole thread (all 45 of
them) got tagged as inbox, which was not the intent.

I guess the point for me is that I frequently search for messages (and
not threads), and when I do so, it's easy for me to forget that actions
taken on the results buffer not only apply to those messages, they can
apply to all messages in threads that happen to contain a matched
message.  

I'll try to capture any examples in the future!

JT