Well-constructed test message.  Xapian's query parser is actually doing the right thing [1] and this is a bug in the way notmuch indexes address list headers.  For each address, _notmuch_message_gen_terms resets the term generator's term position, so your To header indexes with positions as

  c:1 hello:2 com:3 K:1 R:2 world:3 com:4

Thus, the phrase query "hello world" matches hello in position 2 and world in position 3.  Probably the right thing for notmuch to do is to jump up the term generator position between each address so phrase queries don't cross them or span them.

[1] Your to:\'$WORD1@$WORD2\' query didn't work because Xapian doesn't accept a single quote after a prefix.

On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 6:29 PM, Mark Anderson <MarkR.Anderson@amd.com> wrote:

Hi guys, What's up? ("Notmuch")

Apparently matching on email addresses doesn't work the way I hoped.

While debugging why my to:x@y.com search was matching far too many
entries, I whittled it down to this:

WORD1=hello
WORD2=goodbye
MSGID=junk$(date +%s)
TESTDIR=$(notmuch config get database.path)/.tmp/new
TESTMAIL=$TESTDIR/$MSGID:2,

mkdir -p $TESTDIR

echo Testcase for $WORD1@$WORD2, msgid: $MSGID@junk.com

echo "From: nobody@nobody.com
To: c@${WORD1}.com, K-R@${WORD2}.com
Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2011 23:41:34 -0600
Subject: Error
Message-ID: <$MSGID@junk.com>

Not empty body.=

" > $TESTMAIL

notmuch new
notmuch search --output=files to:$WORD1@$WORD2
notmuch search --output=files to:\"$WORD1@$WORD2\"

Why does that match, but this doesn't?

notmuch search --output=files to:\'$WORD1@$WORD2\'

Apparently single quotes are the only quote for Xapian's parser?

I guess this is a strong vote for the quick integration of the custom
parser with optimization passes that turn emails into phrases that can't
match across multiple emails.

This was just an egregious example of notmuch giving me notmuch of what
I wanted, or actually, far too much of what I didn't want.

Thanks,
-Mark

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