On Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:35:26 +0530, aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com (Aneesh Kumar K.V) wrote: > Once i mark the mail as archived how do i search for them ? > Right now with notmuch.el i am adding a tag "archive" when > i am archiving the mail. I am just wondering is this the right > way ? You might expect to be able to find all archived messages with: notmuch search not tag:inbox (And if I had written the query parser that would work fine.) But oddly, that fails because in Xapian's query parser the NOT operator is not a unary operator but is instead a binary operator of AND_NOT. I think the lack of a unary not is a bug in Xapian. In the meantime, what we could use here is some syntax for a query that is guaranteed to match all messages. Anyone have any ideas? Meanwhile, if it's not that you're trying to list all archived messages, (which I think would be a rare thing to want), but instead you want all archived messages matching <some-term> then you can simply do: notmuch search <some-term> and not tag:inbox I hope that helps. Happy hacking, -Carl