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.
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