To: notmuch@notmuchmail.org
From: mueen@nawaz.org
Subject: Re: Sorting and attachments
Date: Sun, 27 Mar 2011 09:40:31 -0700
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Jameson Graef Rollins
<jrollins@finestructure.net> writes:

> On Sat, 26 Mar 2011 21:53:49 -0700, mueen@nawaz.org wrote:
>> 1. Can notmuch return results sorted by size?
>
> As far as I know, there is currently no way to do that (but see below).

It would be really convenient. Would this be a challenging task?

>> 2. Can I tell notmuch to limit the items it returns (e.g. show me
>> first ten messages matching ... )
>
> Are you looking for this in the emacs UI?  The following works for me on
> the command line:
>
> notmuch search '*' | head -10

Well, yes - I was thinking of the Emacs UI. I suppose I could just hack
the .el files, but my knowledge of eLisp is fairly poor.

>> 3. Any plans for searching via attachment size or type? Say I want all
>> emails with attachments bigger than 1 MB.
>
> You can currently search through attachments with the 'attachment:'
> search term.  See "notmuch help search-terms" for more info.  This works
> for searching for mime types.  I don't know of a way to search by size,
> though.

Again, that would be really convenient. I don't know if it would be
challenging. though.

>> Essentially, I have a tendency to prune off large attachments so that
>> my mail directory doesn't blow up...
>
> You might just try using find, which is very useful for this kind of
> thing:
>
> find $MAILDIR -printf '%b %p\n' | sort -n

Well, I would want to exclude certain tags in the query...

In my current mutt workflow, I'm a lot more aggressive. Once I'm done
looking at a (binary) attachment, I actively save or delete it. Then
every few months I just tell mutt to sort by size and delete any
attachments I may have missed. 

I don't expect the exact same workflow with notmuch, but I was trying to
find some way to handle this.