On Tue, Mar 12 2019, Gregor Zattler wrote:
> what I do not understand is that it dosn't matter if I search for
>
> org-notmuch
>
> or
>
> "org-notmuch"
>
> '"org-notmuch"'
>
> or even
>
> org ADJ/1 notmuch

Correct. All four of those forms are giving you phrase searches, (so a
term "org" followed immediately by a term "notmuch").

> a typical example of a matched message is the attached one.
> Somehow the search matches the address of this very mailing list
> in the body of the email (I assume).

No, I don't think you are seeing a match on the mailing-list address
itself, (which has "notmuch" two terms before "org").

> Therefore I wonder why notmuch matches 581 messages, not 16795
> messages or 77 messages.

David showed you one example from the message you copied:

> To: David Edmondson <dme@dme.org>, notmuch@notmuchmail.org

And I showed one earlier in the thread.

In each case, the message includes "org" followed (after some amount of
punctuation and whitespace, perhaps including newlines) by "notmuch".

-Carl