On Sat, 02 Nov 2013, Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote: > I often wondered why when browsing threads, I often see a message that doesn't > describe at all the thread, for example: > > notmuch search ... > thread:000000000000826a 18 mins. ago [45/45] Felipe Contreras; [PATCH/TEST 44/44] > > I can reverse the order of the search: > > notmuch search --sort=oldest-first > thread:000000000000826a 23 mins. ago [45/45] Felipe Contreras; [PATCH/TEST 00/44] > > Then I get the correct summary, but now the order of the search is the other > way around, and there doesn't seem to be a way to specify the order of the > messages independently of the order of the threads. I think it's actually worse than what your example demonstrates. It's the subject of the newest/oldest *matching* message that gets used. In your example, the first/last messages in the thread apparently match your query. > Either way this doesn't make any sense to me. Each thread has a single origin > mail, why would anybody would like to show a message other than that while > displaying the summary of the tread? Even more, why isn't there an option to > fetch that information easily? > > I am forced to get the list of messages, and then grab the first one, even > though it's not efficient, probably unnecessary, and potentiall wrong. For > example, it's possible that multiple mails arrived at the same time, then how > am I supposed to display the one that originated the thread? > > I think there should be a way to get the root mail of a thread, > irrespective of the search order. Largely agreed. It's just that nobody's gotten around to doing this yet. At the cli level I think the consensus is that the structured (sexp/json) output format should contain multiple (or all) subjects. BR, Jani.