Well, it's not quite *away* from Turing complete configuration... but it sounds like you might like the program that computes tags for new messages to get not only the message but also its thread id and read-only access to the database?  Then both filtering "participated" and computing "participated" from "sent" become easy. And fancier ideas like computing tags from senders, list-id, the rest. 

-- 
Brian Sniffen

> On Jun 25, 2017, at 11:46 AM, Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net> wrote:
> 
> Hey all--
> 
> I really appreciate the thought and experimentation and research that's
> gone into this thread!
> 
>> On Thu 2017-06-22 17:00:58 -0700, Matt Armstrong wrote:
>> # All threads in which I participate get tag:participated
>> #  1) Find all threads with a message tagged new
>> #     (finding all 'today' messages helps during testing,
>> #     but isn't necessary)
>> #  2) Run through "xargs -s 2048 echo" to to group threads
>> #     lines of about 2K in size.
>> #  3) For each line (2) produces, narrow the threads to
>> #     those containing a message from me.
>> #  4) For each such thread, tag every message with +participated.
>> notmuch search --output=threads tag:new OR date:today | \
>>  xargs -s 2048 echo | \
>>  xargs -I '{}' notmuch search \
>>  --output=threads from:marmstrong AND \( '{}' \) | \
>>  sed -e 's,^,+participated -- ,' | \
>>  notmuch tag --batch
> 
> This makes sense to me, modulo the split into 2048-octet lines (magic
> numbers make me nervous, though i think i understand why you've included
> it).
> 
> That said, i've been trying to think lately about how to make notmuch a
> tool that's usable by normal humans, who probably won't want to
> understand all the moving pieces here.  I don't want yet another MUA
> that requires you to edit a turing-complete config file to get useful
> functionality -- we already have mutt for that :)
> 
> Is there a way that we can push this idea/functionality further into
> the core of notmuch in a way that makes it easier to use?
> 
> For example, would it make sense to have "notmuch new" (and "notmuch
> insert") do "thread-based propagation" of specific tags?  for example,
> consider the following (i've just made up the config options):
> 
>    notmuch config set new.from_self_tags participated
>    notmuch config set new.propagate_thread_tags participated
> 
> the idea is that "new.from_self_tags" would be applied by "notmuch new" or
> "notmuch insert" if the message was explicitly from: user.primary_email
> or user.other_email.
> 
> and additionally, if a message was inserted into a thread which has any
> of the new.propagated_thread_tags applied, the new message would also
> get those tags.
> 
> What do y'all think?
> 
>    --dkg
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