From: Matt Armstrong <marmstrong@google.com>
To: David Bremner <david@tethera.net>, notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Subject: Re: notmuch and "mute" -- useful to anyone?
In-Reply-To: <87invivm2y.fsf@maritornes.cs.unb.ca>
References: <qf5vazjjciq.fsf@marmstrong-linux.kir.corp.google.com>
 <87invivm2y.fsf@maritornes.cs.unb.ca>
User-Agent: Notmuch/0.21 (https://notmuchmail.org) Emacs/24.3.1
 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
Date: Wed, 03 Aug 2016 10:33:01 -0700
Message-ID: <qf5fuqlkbaq.fsf@marmstrong-linux.kir.corp.google.com>
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David Bremner <david@tethera.net> writes:

> Matt Armstrong <marmstrong@google.com> writes:
>
>> Is anyone else interested in Gmail-like "mute" support in notmuch.el?
>> If so, I can think about polishing the below off and adding it to
>> notmuch.
>>
>> I've managed to implement Gmail's "mute" in notmuch as follows in my
>> notmuch-post-new:
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> # Unmute all threads with new messages sent to me.
>> notmuch search --output=threads tag:new AND tag:me | \
>>   xargs --no-run-if-empty notmuch tag -muted --
>>
>> # Remove all muted threads from the inbox and mark every message in them
>> # muted.  Ideally this would be atomic with the above.
>> notmuch search --output=threads tag:muted | \
>>   xargs --no-run-if-empty notmuch tag -inbox +muted --
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> See also the example of https://notmuchmail.org/excluding/
>
> This kind of thing is what message exclusion is invented for.
>
> I guess you have to adjust to get precisely the semantics you want where
> messages specifically to you are not muted.

"mute" is a bit odd.  It is essentially "new messages in this thread
skip the inbox".  It is a property of a thread, not a message.

It has little to do with excluding messages from arbitrary searches.  In
particular, muted threads should show up in normal free text searches.
I don't think message exclusion is the right mechanism.

The spec is: when a message arrives,
  if it is "to me" unmute any thread it is part of
  otherwise if it is in a muted thread, avoid tagging it "inbox"

This is a little bit hard to deal with in a the notmuch model, which
deals more naturally with mechanisms that tag individual messages and
handles threading as a post-search message gathering step (as far as I
can tell).

I'm not claiming that what I've got is optimal -- it feels like a hack
to me, but is the best I came up with.