Sender: Suvayu Ali <fatkasuvayu@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 18 Jul 2015 17:32:39 +0200
From: Suvayu Ali <fatkasuvayu+linux@gmail.com>
To: notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Subject: Re: Searching for phrases in the body of an email
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Hi Xu,

On Sat, Jul 18, 2015 at 10:54:30AM -0400, Xu Wang wrote:
> 
> First note that I believe notmuch search is case insensitive by
> default, so your grep should be case insensitive as well.

Good point, I tried that, didn't change the numbers much.  The number of
matches from grep went up to 24, whereas notmuch count says 463.

> More importantly, I'm not sure how 'no NEAR "plain text" ' syntax is
> parsed. Maybe it is parsed as {no NEAR plain} or {text}.
> 

Exactly, that's what I do not understand.

> You would like to search for the exact phrase, correct? How about the
> following?
> 
> notmuch search no adj plain adj text

Good suggestion.  I tried it, and gives me very consistent numbers:

$ notmuch count -- no ADJ plain ADJ text
20
$ notmuch show -- $(notmuch search --output=messages -- no NEAR \"plain\ text\") | \
      grep -c -iE 'plain[[:space:]/]+text'
24

Of course this does not help me solve my original goal, but I guess now
I can try different queries based on your idea.

Thanks a lot!

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.