Strangeness in search syntax

[Michael Parks]

Greetings all,

I've noticed something interesting when trying to do searches against specific message fields. As an example, I'm signed up to the Debian security advisories list, and those are all tagged with a "[SECURITY]" in the subject line. Getting sup to retrieve these messages, and only these messages, has proven to be problematic.

Specifically, it appears as if the brackets are ignored. If I run a full query for:

subject:"[SECURITY]"

..I also get other messages which have the word "security" in the subject lines. Similar searches which return identical results include:

subject: [SECURITY]
subject:[SECURITY]
subject:\[SECURITY\]
subject: \[SECURITY\]
subject:"\[SECURITY\]"

..none of which result in the desired search behavior. It's as if the brackets are being silently ignored.

I just wanted to ask and make sure I'm not doing something silly before opening a bug on this :)

--M

[Ruthard Baudach]

Greetings back,

This is not sup, but xapian related.

Xapian (www.xapian.org) draws its power from stemming and indexing the
documents it is fed, thus only being able to find what it's stemmer
considers to be a "word".

I'm not a xapian expert -- only played a bit with it -- but unless there
are some deeply buried settings in the xapian API to add brackets to
xapian's concept of a word, it's not possible to distinguish [SECURITY]
and SECURITY.

By the way, this would not be the sup way to do it anyhow. We've got
labels, so the thing to do would be to set up a before-add-message hook
to autolabel incomming email from Debian with subject [SECURITY], and
search for `label:debian AND label:security`

Or simply search for
`from:debian-secur...@lists.debian.org AND subject:security`
(and label them with debsec or so for faster access -- this address is
so long!)

Regards,

Ruthard

>== Auszüge aus der Nachricht von Michael Parks vom 2015-04-30 11:14:

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--

Dr. Ruthard Baudach
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97209 Veitshöchheim
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