-# Searching with notmuch
+[[!img notmuch-logo.png alt="Notmuch logo" class="left"]]
+# Searching with Notmuch
What good is an advanced indexing mail client if we don't know how to
use it to actually find e-mail?
-As notmuch is using Xapian
-[this page](http://xapian.org/docs/queryparser.html) is a good start.
-However, the description is generic (applies to Xapian in general) and
-its intended audience seems to be developers wanting to use Xapian in
-their applications. This page attempts to explain it to users of notmuch (who
-may not be familiar with Xapian). 'notmuch help search-terms' also has a few
-pointers.
+The [[notmuch-search-terms manual page|manpages/notmuch-search-terms-7]] should
+cover everything in a fairly concise manner. Please refer to that for any
+details.
+
+Notmuch uses the [Xapian](http://xapian.org/) search engine. The [Xapian
+QueryParser](http://xapian.org/docs/queryparser.html) documentation has
+a generic description of the search language. The intended audience is
+developers wanting to use Xapian in their applications; this page
+attempts to explain it to users of Notmuch.
## Stemming
be able to search for e-mails within a specific date range. This will
work:
- notmuch search <initial timestamp>..<final-timestamp>
-
-However, until a better syntax is implemented the only form accepted for
-timestamps is Unix time (seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC), so the
-utility 'date' can help:
-
- notmuch search $(date +%s -d 2009-10-01)..$(date +%s)
+ notmuch search date:<since>..<until>
-Explanation: '+%s' will tell date to output Unix time format and -d will
-tell date to output the date from 2009-10-01. See date(1) for more
+For `<since>` and `<until>`, notmuch understands a variety of standard
+and natural ways of expressing dates and times, both in absolute terms
+("2012-10-24") and in relative terms ("yesterday"). Please refer to the
+[[notmuch-search-terms manual page|manpages/notmuch-search-terms-7]] for
details.