+.SH SEARCH SYNTAX
+Several notmuch commands accept a common syntax for search terms.
+
+The search terms can consist of free-form text (and quoted phrases)
+which will match all messages that contain all of the given
+terms/phrases in the body, the subject, or any of the sender or
+recipient headers.
+
+In addition to free text, the following prefixes can be used to force
+terms to match against specific portions of an email, (where
+<brackets> indicate user-supplied values):
+
+ from:<name-or-address>
+
+ to:<name-or-address>
+
+ subject:<word-or-quoted-phrase>
+
+ attachment:<word>
+
+ tag:<tag>
+
+ id:<message-id>
+
+ thread:<thread-id>
+
+The
+.B from:
+prefix is used to match the name or address of the sender of an email
+message.
+
+The
+.B to:
+prefix is used to match the names or addresses of any recipient of an
+email message, (whether To, Cc, or Bcc).
+
+Any term prefixed with
+.B subject:
+will match only text from the subject of an email. Searching for a
+phrase in the subject is supported by including quotation marks around
+the phrase, immediately following
+.BR subject: .
+
+The
+.B attachment:
+prefix can be used to search for specific filenames (or extensions) of
+attachments to email messages.
+
+For
+.BR tag: ,
+valid tag values include
+.BR inbox " and " unread
+by default for new messages added by
+.B notmuch new
+as well as any other tag values added manually with
+.BR "notmuch tag" .
+
+For
+.BR id: ,
+message ID values are the literal contents of the Message-ID: header
+of email messages, but without the '<', '>' delimiters.
+
+The
+.B thread:
+prefix can be used with the thread ID values that are generated
+internally by notmuch (and do not appear in email messages). These
+thread ID values can be seen in the first column of output from
+.B "notmuch search"
+
+In addition to individual terms, multiple terms can be
+combined with Boolean operators (
+.BR and ", " or ", " not
+, etc.). Each term in the query will be implicitly connected by a
+logical AND if no explicit operator is provided, (except that terms
+with a common prefix will be implicitly combined with OR until we get
+Xapian defect #402 fixed).
+
+Parentheses can also be used to control the combination of the Boolean
+operators, but will have to be protected from interpretation by the
+shell, (such as by putting quotation marks around any parenthesized
+expression).
+
+Finally, results can be restricted to only messages within a
+particular time range, (based on the Date: header) with a syntax of:
+
+ <intial-timestamp>..<final-timestamp>
+
+Each timestamp is a number representing the number of seconds since
+1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC. This is not the most convenient means of
+expressing date ranges, but until notmuch is fixed to accept a more
+convenient form, one can use the date program to construct
+timestamps. For example, with the bash shell the folowing syntax would
+specify a date range to return messages from 2009-10-01 until the
+current time:
+
+ $(date +%s -d 2009-10-01)..$(date +%s)