On Sun, Mar 09 2025, Martin Monperrus wrote:
> Hi Notmuch team, Here is a bug report. Thanks, --Martin

Thanks for the note, Martin.

I have a hard time considering this a bug, though. See below...

> ## Actual behavior
>
> Notmuch indexes all messages including the replied content.

Notmuch is indexing the content of every message and searching for that
content correctly. That's as it was designed to do, (ensuring that a
user can find any email in their mail store).

> This is a problem because when one searches for a message with
> content, we get all emails replying to it.

Imagine a case where you receive a message that is a forward of a
reply. In this case, you will not have the original message, and if
notmuch never indexed the quoted content then there would be no way for
you to search for and find the content.

So, notmuch must necessarily index the content.

What is missing is a way to be able to indicate that you want to search
for content that is in a message but not part of the quoted content.

What notmuch could do to support a feature like that is to index all
quoted content with a different term prefix than it does unquoted
content. Then, by default search could be made to match on both
terms. And new search syntax could be added to search specifically for
unquoted content.

Definitely not a small change, but if someone is really motivated by
wanting the feature, that should be possible at least.

-Carl
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