Searching mail¶

Search is the spine of Antiphon: every listing is a notmuch query. The sidebar's built-in views (all, inbox, unread, flagged), your saved searches, and the bulk actions all run through the same engine, so one query language covers everything and every answer comes from the local index, instantly and offline.

The prompt¶

/ opens the search prompt; type a query and Enter runs it, Esc abandons it. A blank query (or a single *) lists everything in scope.

A search never leaves the current scope: the unified view searches every account, a scoped view searches its account alone. Switch scope with gt / gT, g1..g9 or gu, and the same query answers differently. Antiphon wraps your query so it cannot escape the scope; a query with unbalanced quotes or parentheses is rejected with an error rather than run with a different meaning.

Words and phrases¶

Bare words match the body, the subject and the sender and recipient headers, and every word must match:

invoice unpaid

A quoted phrase matches those words in that order:

subject:"quarterly report"

English words are stemmed (detail finds details and detailed); a capitalised word is searched exactly, so Alba does not find albacore. A trailing * completes a word: wild* matches wildcard and wildcat.

Prefixes¶

A prefix pins a term to one part of the message:

Prefix	Matches
`from:`	the sender's name or address
`to:`	any recipient: To, Cc or Bcc
`subject:`	words or a quoted phrase in the subject
`body:`	words in the body alone
`tag:`	a notmuch tag: `unread`, `flagged`, ones your rules add
`folder:`	a maildir folder, account name first (see below)
`path:`	a store directory; `path:work/**` is the whole account
`date:`	a date or date range (see below)
`attachment:`	an attachment's file name or extension
`mimetype:`	a MIME part's content type
`id:`	a Message-ID, without the angle brackets
`thread:`	a notmuch thread id

Folder paths are as the store knows them: lowercase, /-separated, with the account name first. folder:personal is the personal account's inbox (its root maildir), and folder:personal/lists/aerc one of its subfolders.

from:alba tag:unread
attachment:pdf subject:invoice
folder:work/receipts date:2026-06

Dates¶

date: takes a single expression or a .. range, either end open:

date:2026-06                  the whole of June
date:2026-01..2026-06         January through June
date:2026-06..                since June
date:..yesterday              up to the end of yesterday

Relative expressions work too (date:yesterday, date:monday, date:last_week); write any spaces as underscores inside a range.

Combining terms¶

Terms combine with and, or and not, and parentheses group them; plain adjacency means and:

tag:unread and (from:alba or from:finn)
subject:invoice not folder:personal/receipts

Regular expressions¶

from:, subject:, tag:, path:, folder: and mid: also take a regular expression between slashes:

from:/@example[.](com|net)$/
subject:/^\[PATCH/

This needs a notmuch built against a Xapian with field processors (Xapian 1.4 or later), which is true of current distribution packages.

Saved searches¶

A query you run daily earns a sidebar entry:

[[saved_searches]]
name = "invoices"
query = "tag:invoices or subject:invoice"

Saved searches live in config.toml (see configuration) and run inside whatever scope is active when you open them.

Acting on a whole search¶

A search result is also a unit you can act on: the :trash-all, :archive-all, :move-all and :delete-all commands apply to every message the current query matches, behind a confirmation that shows the exact count. See bulk actions.