On Mon, Sep 28, 2015 at 07:00:13PM -0700, Carl Worth wrote: > On Mon, Sep 28 2015, Xu Wang wrote: > > > To understand more, what does the following search for? > > > > from:jongho attachment:.*pdf > > Uhm, probably only strange things. There are some mechanisms for getting > notmuch to emit some debugging information on what the final search > terms end up being, (but I don't recall if they still require > recompilation or not). This should work: $ export NOTMUCH_DEBUG_QUERY=1 $ notmuch count -- from:suvayu attachment:*.pdf Query string is: from:suvayu attachment:*.pdf Exclude query is: Xapian::Query() Final query is: Xapian::Query((Tmail AND ZXFROMsuvayu:(pos=1) AND Zattach:(pos=2) AND Zpdf:(pos=3))) 217 $ notmuch count -- from:suvayu attachment:pdf Query string is: from:suvayu attachment:pdf Exclude query is: Xapian::Query() Final query is: Xapian::Query((Tmail AND ZXFROMsuvayu:(pos=1) AND ZXATTACHMENTpdf:(pos=2))) 151 I guess to answer the OP's question, the globbed form simply does a text search of attach and pdf. The keyword is not recognised at all. Cheers, -- Suvayu Open source is the future. It sets us free.