From: Michal Sojka <sojkam1@fel.cvut.cz>
To: Darren McGuicken <mailing-notmuch@fernseed.info>,
	Matthieu Lemerre <racin@free.fr>, notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] How to improve the mail handling workflow?
In-Reply-To: <87sjz6ft52.fsf@bookbinder.fernseed.info>
References: <87fwv65zw1.fsf@free.fr> <87sjz6ft52.fsf@bookbinder.fernseed.info>
User-Agent: Notmuch/0.5-11-g48b5e00 (http://notmuchmail.org) Emacs/23.2.1
	(x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
Date: Sat, 13 Nov 2010 07:05:58 +0100
Message-ID: <87sjz5pxkp.fsf@steelpick.2x.cz>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Precedence: list

On Fri, 12 Nov 2010, Darren McGuicken wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Nov 2010 16:23:58 +0100, Matthieu Lemerre <racin@free.fr> wrote:
> > Here is first a patch that copes with this last point. Whenever you
> > want to archive a thread, it finds whether you forgot to add a custom
> > "user" tag to a message, and if so asks you for a tag to add before
> > archiving. That way, I no longer have messages without any tags.
> 
> Hmm, this would be very irritating in my own workflow in which I really
> only use a small number of tags on a fraction of my total mail archive
> to differentiate mail type or content which can't otherwise be
> determined from the indexed plain text of the message (I don't like to
> add a 'notmuch' tag to mail from the list for instance since a saved
> search for mail sent to the list address does exactly the same thing).

I agree with you in that in many cases tags can be replaced by saved
searches. Last time I did it, i.e. used saved searches to distinguish
messages from different mailing lists, the result was that it took very
long time (something like 5 seconds) to show notmuch-hello screen. There
is a bug in notmuch hello, as I described in
id:"87wrtz3pw2.fsf@steelpick.2x.cz".

Additionally, I compared the speed of command line searches for tags and
for the whole email addresses and even without the bug mentioned above,
the search for to: is usually slower than the search for tag:.

And finally, there are some mailing lists, which changed their address
in the past or have multiple aliases and in this case you always has to
use a more complex search to match all messages to that mailing list and
these searches are even more slow than tag searches.

-Michal