Hi Frederick,

Frederick Eaton <frederik@ofb.net> writes:

> I am trying to figure out how to adapt a script I wrote for 
> filtering messages, to apply notmuch tags to each message. A 
> difficulty is that the messages are already in the Notmuch 
> database, because another tool has delivered them to a maildir 
> and run "notmuch new".
>
> Now, Notmuch can provide me with the paths of all the new 
> (unfiltered) messages, which I can give to my script. The 
> question I have is, once the filter is done, how can the script 
> tell Notmuch which message to apply the tags to? 
 

I am not sure if I understand you correctly. If the problem here 
is to distinguish existing messages and new messages, would the 
config option 'new.tags' work? For example, use

    notmuch config set new.tags new

to give all new messages a 'new' tag.
 
> I've tentatively concluded that the best way to locate each 
> message in the Notmuch database is to extract the Message-ID and 
> search for it with "id:"? But the FAQ says that multiple 
> messages can have the same Message-ID (and some spam messages 
> don't have one at all). 

IIRC, in the Notmuch database tags are associated with message 
IDs, so you probably do not need to worry about this. 

> If I could access the message using the filename that the script 
> is processing, it would seem slightly more reliable. It seems 
> like there should be some way to allow a Notmuch database entry 
> to be accessed directly by filename, without even creating a 
> Notmuch-style search query containing that filename, but rather 
> by passing the filename as a command-line argument to "notmuch". 
> It would be nice not to have to worry about quoting and 
> unquoting. 
 
I am not sure if this is useful, given that (presumably) Notmuch 
uses message IDs as keys. Besides, those filenames are usually 
generated automatically and quite cryptic.

> When I try to search for a message using "path:", nothing seems 
> to work.
>
> [...]
>
> There were no results for any of the "path:" searches, although 
> the "id:" search worked. I am using version 0.32.2 and can 
> update if this may be related to a bug that was fixed in the 
> past few years.

I have never used 0.32.2 so I am not sure if there are any 
differences, but for version 0.38.3, the prefix "path:" is used to 
search for messages in some *directory*, and the query should be 
*relative* to the maildir.

I highly recommend the manual page 'notmuch-search-terms(7)' and 
also other pages if you have time. They are informative and well 
written, and very helpful for writing message processing scripts.

Regards,
Pengji
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