Quoth Damien Cassou on Oct 01 at 11:42 am: > On Sat, Sep 29, 2012 at 6:12 PM, Austin Clements <amdragon@mit.edu> wrote: > > $ notmuch search 'folder:"[Gmail].All Mail"' > > $ notmuch search 'folder:"[Gmail].Important"' > > thank you very much, it indeed works. I'm still a bit puzzled by the > fact that, on my other mailbox, I'm getting the following results: > > $ notmuch search 'folder:"[Gmail].Important"' | wc --lines > 8928 > $ notmuch search folder:[Gmail].Important | wc --lines > 138 > > So, without using quoting, something is indeed happening. Do you know what? In the latter case, you're finding emails that contain the words "folder" (or words like folder), "gmail", and "important". $ NOTMUCH_DEBUG_QUERY=1 notmuch search 'folder:"[Gmail].Important"' Final query is: Xapian::Query((Tmail AND (XFOLDERgmail:(pos=1) PHRASE 2 XFOLDERimportant:(pos=2)))) This is slightly inscrutable, but you can see that it applied the folder prefix ("XFOLDER") to both "gmail" and "important" and required that the two terms appear in a phrase (that is, next to each other). $ NOTMUCH_DEBUG_QUERY=1 notmuch search 'folder:[Gmail].Important' Final query is: Xapian::Query((Tmail AND Zfolder:(pos=1) AND gmail:(pos=2) AND important:(pos=3))) Whereas here, it's searching for folder, gmail, and important as regular and completely independent terms (the Z on folder means it's stemmed, so it will match folders, foldered, etc.)