Subject: Re: bug#66885: 29.1; gnus search with mu always returns empty

From: Eric Abrahamsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 03 Nov 2023 16:32:39 -0700

Britt Anderson <[email-masked]> writes:

> Thank you for your efforts so far, but I still cannot get it working.
>
> Your recommendation for the remove-prefix didn't work for me. I
> essentially tried incrementally going through the directory hierarchy
> and never found a level that I could specify and it would work.

Bummer, in theory that should have done it.

> But even if I had, it would not be a very complete solution, because I
> have numerous accounts with numerous user names that live under
> ~/home/britt/.local/share/mail~
>
> there is a microsoft exchange email account, a protonmail account, a
> gandi account ( and I have a few more that I haven't even set up yet).

And each of these is a separate Gnus backend, right?

> I would really like to be able to search across those, and I can do this
> with mu where it will show up all the emails it finds that meet the
> search criteria.
>
> It seems like that even if I could find a "remove-prefix" that would
> have worked for that one particular search we tested that would not have
> been the necessary prefix for searches in other folders/groups.

The remove-prefix should delete the file path up to the level of the
server, meaning that the group/folder name will be read as the first
filepath segment _after_ the removal.

In theory, if you have multiple mail installations all indexed by mu,
and those installations are represented by multiple Gnus backends, it
could still work. If each backend was configured with a separate
remove-prefix, then it could only extract the results that were relevant
to that backend. I don't think that would currently work correctly,
though.

> For right now I have gone back to using a local dovecot server to use
> imap, and imap search is now good enough most of the time (with your
> excellent work on standardizing the search command to use a common
> structure).
>
> I am happy to try again if you have some suggestions, but otherwise it
> is probably reasonable to just close this and I will search with mu on
> the command line on those few occassions where I cannot find what I need
> with the built-in imap search functions.

I've got another outstanding bug report on indexed search engine
behavior, so I'll need to find some time to install a few dummy
maildir/notmuch/mu servers and experiment. I may come back to you with
more questions after that. Please leave the bug report open!

Thanks,
Eric