So if I understand it well, running the query in sexp mode: notmuch
count --query=sexp '(tag "")'

will yield the actual "tagless" tag, which in my case is 0.

while this query: notmuch count -- tag:

will yield "garbage" results, which in my case today is 1681, it has
increased by 2, and in both cases it's these two very emails I've sent
to the mailing list :-)

I shouldn't be worried, right?


On Mon, 21 Oct 2024 at 20:21, David Bremner
<david_at_tethera.net_prowess-alarm-much@duck.com> wrote:
>
> prowess-alarm-much@duck.com writes:
>
> > Dear developers and maintainers,
> >
> > I'm a fan of notmuch, but recently notmuch indexed 1679 messages with
> > an empty tag, when I run: notmuch count -- tag:
> >
> > When I look for some of the messages in this list, I get messages that
> > have some tags already, and messages with no tags, but somehow,
> > notmuch seems to consider the existence of a "" tag. And the outcome
> > is the same, whether I search for: tag:,tag:'', or even
> > tag:"". Even together with other tags.
>
> the TL;DR:
>
> Unfortunately this is just the default query parser in Xapian (that
> notmuch extends) falling back to looking for messages containing the
> word tag.
>
> The longer explanation:
>
> If you are curious, you can run
>
>     $ NOTMUCH_DEBUG_QUERY=t notmuch count tag:""
>     Query string is:
>     tag:
>     Exclude query is:
>     Query((((Kspam OR Kdeleted) OR Kmuted) OR Kbad-address))
>     Final query is:
>     Query(((Tmail AND (Ztag@1 OR ZGtag@1 OR ZKtag@1 OR ZKtag@1 OR ZQtag@1 OR
>     ZQtag@1 OR ZPtag@1 OR ZXPROPERTYtag@1 OR ZXFOLDER:tag@1 OR ZXFROMtag@1
>     OR ZXTOtag@1 OR ZXATTACHMENTtag@1 OR ZXMIMETYPEtag@1 OR ZXSUBJECTtag@1
>     OR ZXUList:tag@1)) AND_NOT (((Kspam OR Kdeleted) OR Kmuted) OR
>     Kbad-address)))
>
> It's probably not too easy to read, but if squint you can see a bunch of
> prefixes other than K, which is tag.
>
> In case of surprising results, it's also worth trying the sexp query
> parser, as it is more likely to report errors, and in general handles
> corner cases better (the flip side of being less DWIM, I guess).
>
> NOTMUCH_DEBUG_QUERY=t notmuch count --query=sexp '(tag "")'
>
>     Query string is:
>     (tag "")
>     Exclude query is:
>     Query((((Kspam OR Kdeleted) OR Kmuted) OR Kbad-address))
>     Final query is:
>     Query(((Tmail AND (<alldocuments> AND K)) AND_NOT (((Kspam OR
>     Kdeleted) OR Kmuted) OR Kbad-address)))
>
> This query is easier to read, in particular K alone is the correct
> translation for an empty tag. For me this gets the expected answer 0.
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