Re: find threads where I and Jian participated but not Dave

Subject: Re: find threads where I and Jian participated but not Dave

Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2017 13:04:53 -0700

To: Gaute Hope, David Bremner, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, notmuch@notmuchmail.org, Xu Wang

Cc:

From: Matt Armstrong

Gaute Hope <eg@gaute.vetsj.com> writes:

> David Bremner writes on juni 15, 2017 22:20:
>> Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net> writes:
>>>
>>> One of my long-standing wishes is to be able to say "show me mails in my
>>> inbox from people who have replied to messages i've sent them".
>>>
>>> This could be re-framed as "show me threads in which i've participated,
>>> where there are some messages flagged with 'inbox'".  but generating a
>>> huge list of all threads in which i've participated, just to be able to
>>> do an intersection operation with a (much smaller) list of all threads
>>> that have a message with the inbox flag seems like a pretty gross
>>> inefficiency.
>> 
>> At the moment the best we could do is essentially the same algorithm,
>> but in C instead of shell / python. Threads are not documents in the
>> database, so they can't efficiently be searched for.  Of course we could
>> change that, but those kind of changes take a fair amount of effort, and
>> some careful design work.
>
> There are probably multiple earlier references to this, but here's one:
>
>   id:1471858269.x2m28lgosh.astroid@strange
>
> matching against the whole thread vs the individual messages would be
> very useful!

For what it is worth, I've found this idea from Daniel intriguing and
pretty useful in practice:

  "show me threads in which i've participated, where there are some
   messages flagged with 'inbox'"

I implement it like this in my post-new hook:

    # All messages in threads in which I participate get tag:participated
    notmuch search --output=threads from:marmstrong | \
      sed -e 's,^,+participated -- ,' | \
      notmuch tag --batch

On my database the query takes about two seconds to run, and lets me to
searches like "tag:inbox and tag:participated".  The set of threads
found is typically a subset of "tag:inbox and to:marmstrong", but not
always, and I now have two canned "inbox" searches:

  "participated" -> "tag:inbox and tag:participated"
  "me" -> "tag:inbox and to:marmstrong and not tag:participated"

The "me" search tends to be new stuff, bot-generated notifications, and
such.  The "participated" is typically active conversations and stuff
I've already engaged with, or initiated myself.

Thread: