Matthew Lear <matt@bubblegen.co.uk> writes: > > item: foo > an item: foo > an item: XYfoo1234 > an item: XYfoo bar > > ... only the first two are found. > > Also: > * notmuch searching for subject:"item: f" gives zero results. notmuch (and xapian) are based on searching for words, not substrings. It only finds subwords through a process of stemming [1]. > > * notmuch searching for subject:"(*foo*)" results in the first two threads > being found and also a thread with the word footprint in the middle of the > subject being found (subject is "memory footprint without feature"). wildcards [2] are supported only at the end of words, so I suppose the first * is just ignored. > > Why doesn't notmuch search subject:foo find all four threads, and why > doesn't notmuch search subject:"item: f" find anything at all? Hopefully the above clears it up. This topic comes up fairly often; I'm not sure if there is something we could add to the (already rather long) notmuch-search-terms manpage that would help. [1] "Stemming" in notmuch-search-terms (7) [2] "Wildcards" in notmuch-search-terms (7)