>> It is not possible to use wildcards at the beginning of a term.
>
> after the current explanation to emphasize this limitation (possibly
> blaming Xapian to avoid futile requests).
>
> I think it is something many would expect (and want). The current
> description feels more like an example, and it is easy to make the
> assumption that it works for prefixing the terms as well - although,
> technically, nothing is promised in the original docs.

I ran into this problem before as well. Storage is cheap. Notmuch could
index all emails with reversed text to get around some of this
problem. It doesn't solve the problem of *analysis*, but it's still an
improvement.

  Sebastian