Wael Nasreddine <wael.nasreddine@gmail.com> writes:

> Hey guys,
>
> I am trying to exclude any thread that has the tag *killed* but it's
> either a bug or something that I am simply doing wrong.
>
>  $ notmuch search tag:work and tag:unread and tag:inbox and not tag:killed | grep 'killed' | wc -l
>  1
>
> I am getting the same result with Trusty shipped notmuch v0.17 and with
> today's build.
>

Search works by matching messages.  So if you have a thread with at
least one message which does not have that tag, that thread will still
show up in a "not tag:killed" search.

The way I maintain killed threads is to search for tag:killed, and then
call notmuch tag -inbox -unread for all those threads.  Here's my code
to do this:

 # killed threads
 for th in $(notmuch search --output=threads -- tag:killed); do
     notmuch tag -inbox -unread -new -- $th
 done

-- 
regards,
kushal