On Wed, 04 Jul 2012, Peter Wang <novalazy@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 03 Jul 2012 19:22:18 -0700, Jameson Graef Rollins <jrollins@finestructure.net> wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 03 2012, Peter Wang <novalazy@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > I want to see what the sender intended, before hitting reply.
>> 
>> Given that there have been requests to see a lot of other headers as
>> well, we probably need to have a discussion about which ones are worth
>> of emitting, and how we give the user some more general control to see
>> the ones they want.  Either that or we just emit them all?
>
> If we start with the obvious:
>
>   notmuch show --output-headers=date,from,subject,to,cc,reply-to ...
>
> with the default being the current set.
>
> Emitting everything would be easier but seems wasteful.  I just looked
> at a random message: in RFC822 syntax the header is 4073 bytes, and the
> body is 1116 bytes.  Keeping only the fields that notmuch emits reduces
> the header to 295 bytes.  Reply-To is 92 bytes, but not every message
> has that.

I wonder if it would make sense for this option to be combined with
something like
id:"1341041595-5858-1-git-send-email-markwalters1009@gmail.com" which
chooses whether to output the body of the message or not.

Maybe something like --output=short|medium|full
with short being just the brief headers, medium being the current
default of brief headers and text bodies, and full being message with
all headers.

I am not sure I like it (as someone will want full headers and no
bodies!) but we don't want the command line to get too cluttered.

Another possibility for this particular choice: could a list of wanted
headers be included in the config file? Since I think you want it for
"user wants to see it" reasons rather than "program needs it to do
something" reasons that might make sense.

Best wishes

Mark