[Evolution] Understanding the "Free form expression" syntax (GMail-like search with conditional operators)

[Jeff <web kiddo free fr>]

Hi there,

I'm running Evolution 3.42.4 and I'm having trouble understanding the free-form search syntax that was preliminarily documented here: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=550796#c10

As referenced there (and reportedly now integrated in the manual directly in the upcoming Evolution version): https://help.gnome.org/users/evolution/stable/mail-searching.html.en

I have tried a fairly simple search in my inbox, where I wanted to see all the messages from a colleague (Marjorie) that come either via one of her email addresses, or from notifications from Trello. I tried these permutations:

trello or:(marjorie)

trello OR:(marjorie)

subject:trello or:(from:trello) or:(from:marjorie)

f:trello or:(f:marjorie)

f:Trello or:(f:Marjorie)

f:rello or:(f:arjorie)

...with various permutations of uppercase/lowercase/shorthand vs full length, etc.

I never can seem to get search results out of this "Free form _expression_" search mode, whereas if I use the regular "Subject or Addresses contain" search mode, I can easily find either anything that came from Marjorie, or I can find everything related to Trello (simply by searching "trello"), but not both at the same time since that search mode does not support conditional operators as far as I know. Hence my (so far unsuccessful) attempt at using the "Free form _expression_" search mode.

Do you see something wrong in my examples of search queries above?

Evolution's is confusing to me in that regard. Am I supposed to use only the long versions, or the short versions, or any work? (might be good to specify explicitly that any of those two styles can be used). Are queries case sensitive (I hope not, because I have no guarantee that the sender will be consistent) or were the last two queries above equivalent? (the docs should specify that :)

I tried breaking down the problem into smaller components, and could confirm that all of these queries work, individually:

f:rello

f:marjorie

from:marjo

...etc.

So it seems case-insensitive (yay!) and that the basic search fields work... just not when using the "or:" operator like this:

from:marjo or:(from:trello)

I _thought_ I understood Evolution's syntax but maybe I didn't. I'm not sure if it's me, the docs, or the software.

GMail's documentation is quite easier for me to understand, perhaps because it uses a lot of examples and is consistent with what we've been used to with Google Search over the past two decades: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en

Their syntax feels a bit easier to handle, with the simple use of the word "OR" as an operator (and you can group terms with parentheses if it's more than two terms around the OR condition), you can use "-" as the "NOT" operator, etc. so it feels a bit cleaner than needing to use "or:(foo)" everywhere, if I understood Evolution's syntax correctly.