Yes, that's a problem. FWIW I consider just dropping the -e command line switch b/c I do not believe that it provides a real benefit. Do you see a reason to keep it and fix the behavior?

On Mon 17 Sep 2012 - 04:32:57 [-0700], Justus Winter wrote:

Yes, that's a problem. FWIW I consider just dropping the -e command line switch b/c I do not believe that it provides a real benefit. Do you see a reason to keep it and fix the behavior?

I don't mind. I found it convenient but then lost quite a long time figuring
what is issue was. So I agree that it is better to remove it than to keep it
buggy.

A compromise would be to have a switch to filter out some filters. In this
case the semantic is simpler and this also fulfill my use case.

Nicolas Pouillard
http://nicolaspouillard.fr

-e is still not useful, especially with a filter like FolderNameFilter which makes no sense without config. I do think that the config should be taken into account.

My use case would be: notmuch new does not set any special tag (neither new nor renew) on renamed messages, so that afew -t -n misses out on running FolderNameFilter when you move messages to a different folder using IMAP or so. Which, again, defeats the purpose. Running afew -t -e FolderNameFilter query:myCleverQuery would be a way to work around.

Alternative approach: patch notmuch...

-e looks usefull when you want to apply some filters to all mails, (not only new one), but you do not want to run all other filters on not new mails.

For example, I'm writing a filer to snooze mails, and it had to work on old mail. So my notmuch post-new hook looks like:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/afew --tag --new
/usr/bin/afew --tag -e SnoozeFilter tag:pending
/usr/bin/afew --move --all

I ran into the same issue. Please fix it, it also took me quite some time to realise that this is indeed a bug and not me.

Update: I have a patch for notmuch that tags renamed (moved) messages, I'll try to upstream it shortly.

This would support the mentioned use case: run afew -e FolderFilter tag:renamed to adjust the tags. Well, if afew heeds the config, of course.

Agreed with @matclab, ability to run single filter without relaying on config file is useful.

Also relates to #237, in the way that, if it would be possible to run afew with different configurations, then dropping of -e flag won't hurt. If we can use different configs for every execution, that effectively will cover case of -e.