> I think you guys may have a misunderstanding about how notmuch indexes > mail. Notmuch indexes multiple headers (To, From, Subject, Date) and > the *entire* body of the message. That's kind of the whole point. In > other words, messages don't have to have tags in order to be found. [...] Not at all. Tags are just a useful complement of information, that allows to quickly exclude irrelevant results from your search (and avoids some noisy disk activity). It is just that some of us like to have all their archived mails "classified" in some way (i.e. by adding a label or tag), which can be used as a complementary information to help refine your search. If archiving with a label is seemless, there is no harm in adding informations to your mail, and it can be a real help when you don't remember well what you're searching. Now when you consistently label all your mails, you just don't want to have unclassified mails. That is what we meant by "mail you can't find". Matthieu.