1 Notmuch 0.11 (201x-xx-xx)
2 =========================
4 New command-line features
5 -------------------------
9 Hooks have been introduced to notmuch. Hooks are scripts that notmuch
10 invokes before and after certain actions. Initially, "notmuch new"
11 supports "pre-new" and "post-new" hooks that are run before and after
12 importing new messages into the database.
17 Support "notmuch new" as a notmuch-poll-script
19 It's now possible to use "notmuch new" as a notmuch-poll-script
20 directly. This is also the new default. This allows taking better
21 advantage of the "notmuch new" hooks from emacs without intermediate
24 Improvements in saved search management
26 New saved searches are now appended to the list of saved searches,
27 not inserted in front. It's also possible to define a sort function
28 for displaying saved searches; alphabetical sort is provided.
33 Automatic tag query optimization
35 "notmuch tag" now automatically optimizes the user's query to
36 exclude messages whose tags won't change. In the past, we've
37 suggested that people do this by hand; this is no longer necessary.
40 Notmuch 0.10.2 (2011-12-04)
41 ===========================
46 Fix crash in python bindings.
48 The python bindings did not call g_type_init, which caused crashes
49 for some, but not all users.
51 Notmuch 0.10.1 (2011-11-25)
52 ===========================
59 Argument processing changes in 0.10 introduced a bug where "notmuch
60 --help" crashed while "notmuch help" worked fine. This is fixed in
63 Notmuch 0.10 (2011-11-23)
64 =========================
66 New build and testing features
67 ------------------------------
69 Emacs tests are now done in dtach. This means that dtach is now
70 needed to run the notmuch test suite, at least until the checking for
71 prerequisites is improved.
73 Full test coverage of the stashing feature in Emacs.
75 New command-line features
76 -------------------------
78 Add "notmuch restore --accumulate" option
80 The --accumulate switch causes the union of the existing and new tags to be
81 applied, instead of replacing each message's tags as they are read in from
84 Add search terms to "notmuch dump"
86 The dump command now takes an optional search term much like notmuch
87 search/show/tag. The output file argument of dump is deprecated in
88 favour of using stdout.
90 Add "notmuch search" --offset and --limit options
92 The search command now takes options --offset=[-]N and --limit=N to limit
93 the number of results shown.
95 Add "notmuch count --output" option
97 The count command is now capable of counting threads in addition to
98 messages. This is selected using the new --output=(threads|messages) option.
100 New emacs UI features
101 ---------------------
103 Add tab-completion for notmuch-search and notmuch-search-filter
105 These functions now support completion tags for query parts
106 starting with "tag:".
108 Turn "id:MSG-ID" links into buttons associated with notmuch searches
110 Text of the form "id:MSG-ID" in mails is now a clickable button that
111 opens a notmuch search for the given message id.
113 Add keybinding ('c I') for stashing Message-ID's without an id: prefix
115 Reduces manual labour when stashing them for use outside notmuch.
117 Do not query on notmuch-search exit
119 It is harmless to kill the external notmuch process, so the user
120 is no longer interrogated when they interrupt a search.
125 Emacs now constructs large search buffers more efficiently
127 Search avoids opening and parsing message files
129 We now store more information in the database so search no longer
130 has to open every message file to get basic headers. This can
131 improve search speed by as much as 10X, but taking advantage of this
132 requires a database rebuild:
134 notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
135 # Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
137 notmuch restore notmuch.dump
139 New collection of add-on tools
140 ------------------------------
142 The source directory "contrib" contains tools built on notmuch. These
143 tools are not part of notmuch, and you should check their individual
144 licenses. Feel free to report problems with them to the notmuch
147 nmbug - share tags with a given prefix
149 nmbug helps maintain a git repo containing all tags with a given
150 prefix (by default "notmuch::"). Tags can be shared by commiting
151 them to git in one location and restoring in another.
153 Notmuch 0.9 (2011-10-01)
154 ========================
156 New, general features
157 ---------------------
159 Correct handling of interruptions during "notmuch new"
161 "notmuch new" now operates as a series of small, self-consistent
162 transactions, so it can correctly resume after an interruption or
163 crash. Previously, interruption could lose existing tags, fail to
164 detect messages on resume, or leave the database in a state
165 temporarily or permanently inconsistent with the mail store.
172 notmuch_database_begin_atomic and notmuch_database_end_atomic allow
173 multiple database operations to be performed atomically.
175 notmuch_database_find_message_by_filename does exactly what it says.
179 notmuch_database_find_message (and n_d_f_m_by_filename) now return
180 a status indicator and uses an output parameter for the
181 message. This change required changing the SONAME of libnotmuch to
184 Python bindings changes
185 -----------------------
187 - Re-encode python unicode objects to utf-8 before passing back to
189 - Support Database().begin_atomic()/end_atomic()
190 - Support Database().find_message_by_filename()
191 NB! This needs a db opened in READ-WRITE mode currently, or it will crash
192 the python process. The is a limitation (=bug) of the underlying libnotmuch.
193 - Fixes where we would not throw NotmuchErrors when we should (Justus Winter)
194 - Update for n_d_find_message* API changes (see above).
196 Ruby bindings changes
197 ---------------------
199 - Wrap new library functions notmuch_database_{begin,end}_atomic.
200 - Add new exception Notmuch::UnbalancedAtomicError.
201 - Rename destroy to destroy! according to Ruby naming conventions.
202 - Update for n_d_find_message* API changes (see above).
207 * Add gpg callback to crypto sigstatus buttons to retrieve/refresh
209 * Add notmuch-show-refresh-view function (and corresponding binding)
210 to refresh the view of a notmuch-show buffer.
212 Reply formatting cleanup
213 ------------------------
215 "notmuch reply" no longer includes notification that non-leafnode
216 MIME parts are being suppressed.
218 Notmuch 0.8 (2011-09-10)
219 ========================
221 Improved handling of message/rfc822 parts
223 Both in the CLI and the emacs interface. Output of rfc822 parts now
224 includes the primary headers, as well as the body and all subparts.
225 Output of the completely raw rfc822-formatted message, including all
226 headers, is unfortunately not yet supported (but hopefully will be
229 Improved Build system portability
231 Certain parts of the shell script generating notmuch.sym were
232 specific to the GNU versions of sed and nm. The new version should
233 be more portable to e.g. OpenBSD.
235 Documentation update for Ruby bindings
237 Added documentation, typo fixes, and improved support for rdoc.
239 Unicode, iterator, PEP8 changes for python bindings
241 - PEP8 (code formatting) changes for python files.
242 - Remove Tags.__len__ ; see 0.6 release notes for motivation.
243 - Decode headers as UTF8, encode (unicode) database paths as UTF8.
245 Notmuch 0.7 (2011-08-01)
246 ========================
248 Vim interface improvements
249 --------------------------
251 Jason Woofenden provided a number of bug fixes for the Vim interface
253 * fix citation/signature fold lengths
254 * fix cig/cit parsing within multipart/*
255 * fix on-screen instructions for show-signature
256 * fix from list reformatting in search view
257 * fix space key: now archives (did opposite)
259 Uwe Kleine-König contributed
261 * use full path for sendmail/doc fix
262 * fix compose temp file name
264 Python Bindings changes
265 -----------------------
267 Sebastian Spaeth contributed two changes related to unicode and UTF8:
269 * message tags are now explicitly unicode
270 * query string is encoded as a UTF8 byte string
272 Build-System improvements
273 ------------------------
275 Generate notmuch.sym after the relevant object files
277 This fixes a bug in parallel building. Thanks to Thomas Jost for the
280 Notmuch 0.6.1 (2011-07-17)
281 ==========================
286 Re-export Xapian exception typeinfo symbols.
288 It turned out our aggressive symbol hiding caused problems for
289 people running gcc 4.4.5.
291 Notmuch 0.6 (2011-07-01)
292 =======================
293 New, general features
294 ---------------------
295 Folder-based searching
297 Notmuch queries can now include a search term to match the
298 directories in which mail files are stored (within the mail
299 storage). The syntax is as follows:
303 For example, one might use things such as:
309 to match any path containing a directory "spam", "work/todo", or
310 containing a directory starting with "2011-", respectively.
312 This feature is particularly useful for users of delivery-agent
313 software (such as procmail or maildrop) that is filtering mail and
314 delivering it to particular folders, or users of systems such as
315 Gmail that use filesystem directories to indicate message tags.
317 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
318 notmuch will be searchable with folder: terms. In order to enable
319 this feature for all mail, the entire notmuch index will need to be
322 notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
323 # Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
325 notmuch restore notmuch.dump
329 Both the command line interface and the emacs-interface have new
330 support for PGP/MIME, detailed below. Thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor
331 and Jameson Graef Rollins for making this happen.
333 New, automatic tags: "signed" and "encrypted"
335 These tags will automatically be applied to messages containing
336 multipart/signed and multipart/encrypted parts.
338 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
339 notmuch will receive these tags.
341 New command-line features
342 -------------------------
343 Add new "notmuch show --verify" option for signature verification
345 This option instruct notmuch to verify the signature of
346 PGP/MIME-signed parts.
348 Add new "notmuch show --decrypt" and "notmuch reply --decrypt" options
350 This option instructs notmuch to decrypt PGP/MIME-encrypted parts.
351 Note that this feature currently requires gpg-agent and a passphrase entry
352 tool (e.g. pinentry-gtk or pinentry-curses).
354 Proper nesting of multipart parts in "notmuch show" output
356 MIME parts are now display with proper nesting to reflect original
357 MIME hierarchy of a message. This allows clients to correctly
358 analyze the MIME structure, (such as, for example, determining to
359 which parts a signature part applies).
361 Add new "notmuch show --part" option
363 This is a replacement for the older "notmuch part" command, (which
364 is now deprecated—it should still work as always, but is no longer
365 documented). Putting part output under "notmuch show" allows for all
366 of the "notmuch show" options to be applied when extracting a single
367 part, (such as --format=json for extracting a message part with JSON
370 Deprecate "notmuch search-tags", (in favor of "notmuch search --output=tags *")
372 The "notmuch search-tags" sub-command has been redundant since the
373 addition of the --output=tags option to "notmuch search". We now
374 make that more clear by deprecating "notmuch search-tags", (dropping
375 it from the documentation). We do continue to support the old syntax
376 by translating it internally to the new call.
378 Performance improvements
379 ------------------------
380 Faster searches (by doing fewer searches to construct threads)
382 Whenever a user asks for search results as threads, notmuch first
383 performs a search for messages matching the query, then performs
384 additional searches to find other messages in the resulting threads.
386 Removing inefficiencies and redundancies in these secondary searches
387 results in a measured speedups of 1.5x for a typical search.
389 Faster searches (by doing fewer passes to gather message data)
391 Optimizing Xapian data access patterns (using a single pass to get
392 all message-document data rather than a pass for each data type)
393 results in a measured speedup of 1.7x for a typical search.
395 The benefits of this optimization combine with the preceding
396 optimization. With both in place, Austin Clements measured a speedup
397 of 2.5x for a search of all messages in his inbox (was 4.5s, now
398 1.8s). Thanks, Austin!
400 Faster initial indexing
402 More efficient indexing of new messages results in a measured
403 speedup of 1.4x for the initial indexing of 3 GB of mail (1h 14m
404 rather than 1h 46m). Thanks to Austin Clements and Michal Sojka.
406 Make "notmuch new" faster for unchanged directories
408 Optimizing to not do any further examinations of sub-directories
409 when the filesystem indicates that a directory is unchanged from the
410 last "notmuch new" results in measured speedups of 8.5 for the "No
411 new mail" case, (was 0.77s, now 0.09s). Thanks to Karel Zak.
413 New emacs-interface features
414 ----------------------------
416 Support for PGP/MIME (GnuPG)
418 Automatically indicate validity of signatures for multipart/signed
419 messages. Automatically display decrypted content for
420 multipart/encrypted messages. See the emacs variable
421 notmuch-crypto-process-mime for more information. Note that this
422 needs gpg-agent and a pinentry tool just as the command line tools.
423 Also note there is no support SMIME yet.
425 Output of pipe command is now displayed if pipe command fails
427 This is extremely useful in the common use case of piping a patch to
428 "git am". If git fails to cleanly merge the patch the error messages
429 from the failed merge are now clearly displayed to the user, (where
430 previously they were silently hidden from the user).
432 User-selectable From address
434 A user can choose which configured email addresses should be used as
435 the From address whenever composing a new message. To do so, simply
436 press C-u before the command which will open a new message. Emacs
437 will prompt for the from address to use.
439 The user can customize the "Notmuch Identities" setting in the
440 notmuch customize group in order to use addresses other than those in
441 the notmuch configuration file if desired.
443 The user can also choose to always be prompted for the from address
444 when composing a new message (without having to use C-u) by setting
445 the "Notmuch Always Prompt For Sender" option in the notmuch
448 Hiding of repeated subjects in collapsed thread view
450 In notmuch-show mode, if a collapsed message has the same subject as
451 its parent, the subject is not shown.
453 Automatic detection and hiding of original message in top-posted message
455 When a message contains a line looking something like:
457 ----- Original Message -----
459 emacs hides this and all subsequent lines as an "original message",
460 (allowing the user to click or press enter on the "original message"
461 button to display it again). This makes the handling of top-posted
462 citations work much like conventional citations.
464 New hooks for running code when tags are modified
466 Some users want to perform additional actions whenever a particular
467 tag is added/removed from a message. This could be used to, for
468 example, interface with some external spam-recognition training
469 tool. To facilitate this, two new hooks are added which can be
470 modified in the following settings of the notmuch customize group:
472 Notmuch Before Tag Hook
473 Notmuch After Tag Hook
475 New optional support for hiding some multipart/alternative parts
477 Many emails are sent with redundant content within a
478 multipart/alternative group (such as a text/plain part as well as a
479 text/html part). Users can configure the setting:
481 Notmuch Show All Multipart/Alternative Parts
483 to "off" in the notmuch customize group to have the interface
484 automatically hide some part alternatives (such as text/html
485 parts). This new part hiding is not configured by default yet
486 because there's not yet a simple way to re-display such a hidden
487 part if it is not actually redundant with a displayed part.
489 Better rendering of text/x-vcalendar parts
491 These parts are now displayed in a format suitable for use with the
494 Avoid getting confused by Subject and Author fields with newline characters
496 Replacing all characters with ASCII code less than 32 with a question mark.
498 Cleaner display of From line in email messages (remove double quotes,
499 and drop "name" if it's actually just a repeat of the email address).
501 Vim interface improvements
502 --------------------------
503 Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface:
505 * Using sendmail directly rather than mailx,
506 * Implementing archive in show view
507 * Add support to mark as read in show and search views
508 * Add delete commands
511 Bindings improvements
512 ---------------------
513 Ruby bindings are now much more complete
515 Including QUERY.sort, QUERY.to_s, MESSAGE.maildir_flags_to_tags,
516 MESSAGE.tags_to_maildir_flags, and MESSAGE.get_filenames
518 * Python bindings have been updated and extended
519 (docs online at http://packages.python.org/notmuch/)
522 - Message().get_filenames(),
523 - Message().tags_to_maildir_flags(),Message().maildir_flags_to_tags()
524 - list(Threads()) and list(Messages) works now
526 - Message().__cmp__() and __hash__()
527 These allow, for example:
530 As well as set arithmetic on Messages():
532 s1, s2= set(msgs1), set(msgs2)
537 - len(Messages()) as it exhausted the iterator.
538 Use len(list(Messages())) or
539 Query.count_messages() to get the length.
541 Added initial Go bindings in bindings/go
543 New build-system features
544 -------------------------
545 Added support for building in a directory other than the source directory
547 This can be used with the widely-supported idiom of simply running
548 the configure script from some other directory:
555 Fix to save configure options for future, implicit runs of configure
557 When a user updates the source (such as with "git pull") calling
558 "make" may cause an automatic re-run of the configure script. When
559 this happens, the configure script will automatically be called with
560 the same options the user originally passed in the most-recent
561 manual invocation of configure.
563 New test-suite feature
564 ----------------------
565 Binary for bash for running test suite now located via PATH.
567 The notmuch test suite requires a fairly recent version of bash (>=
568 bash 4). As some systems supply an older version of bash at
569 /bin/bash, the test suite is now updated to search $PATH to locate
570 the bash binary. This allows users of systems with old /bin/bash to
571 simply install bash >= 4 somewhere on $PATH before /bin and then use
574 Support for testing output with a trailing newline.
576 Previously, some tests would fail to notice a difference in the
577 presence/absence of a trailing newline in a program output, (which
578 has led to bugs in the past). Now, carefully-written tests (using
579 test_expect_equal_file rather than test_expect_equal) will detect
580 any change in the presence/absence of a trailing newline. Many tests
581 are updated to take advantage of this.
583 Avoiding accessing user's $HOME while running test suite
585 The test suite now carefully creates its own HOME directory. This
586 allows the test suite to be run with no existing HOME directory, (as
587 some build systems apparently do), and avoids test-suite differences
588 due to configuration files in the users HOME directory.
593 Output *all* files for "notmuch search --output=files"
595 For the cases where multiple files have the same Message ID,
596 previous versions of notmuch would output only one such file. This
597 command is now fixed to correctly output all files.
599 Fixed spurious search results from "overlapped" indexing of addresses
601 This fixed a bug where a search for:
603 to:user@elsewhere.com
605 would incorrectly match a message sent:
607 To: user@example,com, someone@elsewhere.com
609 Fix --output=json when search has no results
611 A bug present since notmuch 0.4 had caused searches with no results
612 to produce an invalid json object. This is now fixed to cleanly
613 return a valid json object representing an empty array "[]" as
616 fix the automatic detection of the From address for "notmuch reply"
617 from the Received headers in some cases.
619 Fix core dump on DragonFlyBSD due to -1 return value from
620 sysconf(_SC_GETPW_R_SIZE_MAX).
622 Cleaned up several memory leaks
624 Eliminated a few, rare segmentation faults and a double-free.
626 Fix libnotmuch library to only export notmuch API functions
628 Previous release of the notmuch library also exported some Xapian
629 C++ exception type symbols. These were never part of the library
630 interface and were never intended to be exported.
632 Emacs-interface bug fixes
633 -------------------------
634 Display any unexpected output or errors from "notmuch search" invocations
636 Previously any misformatted output or trailing error messages were
637 silently ignored. This output is now clearly displayed. This fix was
638 very helpful in identifying and fixing the bug described below.
640 Fix bug where some threads would be missing from large search results
642 When a search returned a "large" number of results, the emacs
643 interface was incorrectly dropping one thread every time the output
644 of the "notmuch search" process spanned the emacs read-buffer. This
647 Avoid re-compression of .gz files (and similar) when saving attachment
649 Emacs was being too clever for its own good and trying to
650 re-compress pre-compressed .gz files when saving such attachments
651 (potentially corrupting the attachment). The emacs interface is
652 fixed to avoid this bug.
654 Fix hiding of a message when a previously-hidden citation is visible
656 Previously the citation would remain visible in this case. This is
657 fixed so that hiding a message hides all parts.
659 Notmuch 0.5 (2010-11-11)
660 ========================
661 New, general features
662 ---------------------
663 Maildir-flag synchronization
665 Notmuch now knows how to synchronize flags in maildir filenames with
666 tags in the notmuch database. The following flag/tag mappings are
675 'S' unread (added when 'S' flag is not present)
677 The synchronization occurs in both directions, (for example, adding
678 the 'S' flag to a file will cause the "unread" tag to be added, and
679 adding the "replied" tag to a message will cause the file to be
680 renamed with an 'R' flag).
682 This synchronization is enabled by default for users of the
683 command-line interface, (though only files in directories named
684 "cur" or "new" will be renamed). It can be disabled by setting the
685 new maildir.synchronize_flags option in the configuration file. For
688 notmuch config set maildir.synchronize_flags false
690 Users upgrading may also want to run "notmuch setup" once (just
691 accept the existing configuration) to get a new, nicely-commented
692 [maildir] section added to the configuration file.
694 For users of the notmuch library, the new synchronization
695 functionality is available with the following two new functions:
697 notmuch_message_maildir_flags_to_tags
698 notmuch_message_tags_to_maildir_flags
700 It is anticipated that future improvements to this support will
701 allow for safe synchronization of the 'T' flag with the "deleted"
702 tag, as well as support for custom flag/tag mappings.
706 Support for querying multiple filenames for a single message
708 It is common for the mailstore to contain multiple files with the
709 same message ID. Previously, notmuch would always hide these
710 duplicate files, (returning a single, arbitrary filename with
711 notmuch_message_get_filename).
713 With this release, library users can access all filenames for a
714 message with the new function:
716 notmuch_message_get_filenames
718 Together with notmuch_filenames_valid, notmuch_filenames_get, and
719 notmuch_filenames_move_to_next it is now possible to iterate over
720 all available filenames for a given message.
722 New command-line features
723 -------------------------
724 New "notmuch show --format=raw" for getting at original email contents
726 This new feature allows for a fully-functional email client to be
727 built on top of the notmuch command-line without needing any direct
728 access to the mail store itself.
730 For example, it's now possible to run "emacs -f notmuch" on a local
731 machine with only ssh access to the mail store/notmuch database. To
732 do this, simply set the notmuch-command variable in emacs to the
733 name of a script containing:
735 ssh user@host notmuch "$@"
737 If the ssh client has enabled connection sharing (ControlMaster
738 option in OpenSSH), the emacs interface can be quite responsive this
743 Fix "notmuch search" to print nothing when nothing matches
745 The 0.4 release had a bug in which:
747 notmuch search <expression-with-no-matches>
749 would produce a single blank line of output, (where previous
750 versions would produce no output. This fix also causes a change in
751 the --format=json output, (which would previously produce "[]" and
752 now produces nothing).
754 Emacs interface improvements
755 ----------------------------
756 Fix to allow pipe ('|') command to work when using notmuch over ssh
758 Fix count of lines in hidden signatures.
760 Omit repeated subject lines in (collapsed) thread display.
762 Display current thread subject in a header line.
764 Provide a "c i" binding to copy a thread ID from the search view.
766 Allow for notmuch-fcc-dirs to have a value of nil.
768 Also, the more complex form of notmuch-fcc-dirs now has a slightly
769 different format. It no longer has a special first-element, fallback
770 string. Instead it's now a list of cons cells where the car of each
771 cell is a regular expression to be matched against the sender
772 address, and the cdr is the name of a folder to use for an FCC. So
773 the old fallback behavior can be achieved by including a final cell
774 of (".*" . "default-fcc-folder").
776 Vim interface improvements
777 --------------------------
778 Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface.
780 These include optimizations, support for newer versions of vim, fixed
781 support for sending mail on modern systems, new commands, and
786 Added initial ruby bindings in bindings/ruby
788 Notmuch 0.4 (2010-11-01)
789 ========================
790 New command-line features
791 -------------------------
792 notmuch search --output=(summary|threads|messages|tags|files)
794 This new option allows for particular items to be returned from
795 notmuch searches. The "summary" option is the default and behaves
796 just as "notmuch search" has historically behaved.
798 The new option values allow for thread IDs, message IDs, lists of
799 tags, and lists of filenames to be returned from searches. It is
800 expected that this new option will be very useful in shell
801 scripts. For example:
803 for file in $(notmuch search --output=files <search-terms>); do
804 <operations-on> "$file"
807 notmuch show --format=mbox <search-specification>
809 This new option allows for the messages matching a search
810 specification to be presented as an mbox. Specifically the "mboxrd"
811 format is used which allows for reversible quoting of lines
812 beginning with "From ". A reader should remove a single '>' from the
813 beginning of all lines beginning with one or more '>' characters
814 followed by the 5 characters "From ".
816 notmuch config [get|set] <section>.<item> [value ...]
818 The new top-level "config" command allows for any value in the
819 notmuch configuration file to be queried or set to a new value. Both
820 single-valued and multi-valued items are supported, as our any
821 custom items stored in the configuration file.
823 Avoid setting Bcc header in "notmuch reply"
825 We decided that this was a bit heavy-handed as the actual mail
826 user-agent should be responsible for setting any Bcc option. Also,
827 see below for the notmuch/emacs user-agent now setting an Fcc by
828 default rather than Bcc.
832 Add notmuch_query_get_query_string and notmuch_query_get_sort
834 These are simply functions for querying properties of a
835 notmuch_query_t object.
839 Enable Fcc of all sent messages by default (to "sent" directory)
841 All messages sent from the emacs interface will now be saved to the
842 notmuch mail store where they will be incorporated to the database
843 by the next "notmuch new". By default, messages are saved to the
844 "sent" directory at the top-level of the mail store. This directory
845 can be customized by means of the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" option in the
846 notmuch customize interface.
848 Ability to all open messages in a thread to a pipe
850 Historically, the '|' keybinding allows for piping a single message
851 to an external command. Now, by prefixing this key with a prefix
852 argument, (for example, by pressing "Control-U |"), all open
853 messages in the current thread will be sent to the external command.
855 Optional support for detecting inline patches
857 This hook is disabled by default but can be enabled with a checkbox
858 under "Notmuch Show Insert Text/Plain Hook" in the notmuch customize
859 interface. It allows for inline patches to be detected and treated
860 as if they were attachments, (with context-sensitive highlighting).
862 Automatically tag messages as "replied" when sending a reply
864 Messages replied to within the emacs interface will now be tagged as
865 "replied". This feature can easily be customized to add or remove
866 other tags as well. For example, a user might use a tag of
867 "needs-reply" and can configure this feature to automatically remove
868 that tag when replying. See "Notmuch Message Mark Replied" in the
869 notmuch customize interface.
871 Allow search-result color specifications to overlay each other
873 For example, one tag can specify the background color of matching
874 lines, while another can specify the foreground. With this change,
875 both settings will now be visible simultaneously, (which was not the
876 case in previous releases). See "Notmuch Search Line Faces" in the
877 notmuch customize interface.
879 Make hidden author names still available for incremental search.
881 When there is insufficient space to display all authors of a thread
882 in search results, the names of hidden authors are now still made
883 available to emacs' incremental search commands. As the user
884 searches, matching lines will temporarily expand to show the hidden
887 New binding of Control-TAB (works like TAB in reverse)
889 Many notmuch nodes already use TAB to navigate forward through
890 various items allowing actions, (message headers, email attachments,
891 etc.). The new Control-TAB binding operates similarly but in the
894 New build-system features
895 -------------------------
896 Various portability fixes have been applied
898 These include fixes for build failures on at least Solaris, FreeBSD,
899 and Fedora systems. We're hopeful that the notmuch code base is now
900 more portable than ever before.
902 Arrange for libnotmuch to be found automatically after make install
904 The notmuch build system is now careful to help the user avoid
905 errors of the form "libnotmuch.so could not be found" immediately
906 after installing. This support takes two forms:
908 1. If the library is installed to a system directory,
909 (configured in /etc/ld.so.conf), then "make install" will
910 automatically run ldconfig.
912 2. If the library is installed to a non-system directory, the
913 build system adds a DR_RUNPATH entry to the final binary
914 pointing to the directory to which the library is installed.
916 When this support works, the user should be able to run notmuch
917 immediately after "make install", without any errors trying to find
918 the notmuch library, and without having to manually set environment
919 variables such as LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
921 Check compiler/linker options before using them
923 The configure script now carefully checks that any desired
924 compilation options, (whether for enabling compiler warnings, or for
925 embedding rpath, etc.), are supported. Only supported options are
926 used in the resulting Makefile.
928 New test-suite features
929 -----------------------
930 New modularization of test suite.
932 Thanks to a gracious relicensing of the test-suite infrastructure
933 from the git project, notmuch now has a modular test suite. This
934 provides the ability to run individual sections of the test suite
935 rather than the whole things. It also provides better summary of
936 test results, with support for tests that are expected to fail
937 (BROKEN and FIXED) in addition to PASS and FAIL. Finally, it makes
938 it easy to run the test suite within valgrind (pass --valgrind to
939 notmuch-test or to any sub-script) which has been very useful.
941 New testing of emacs interface.
943 The test suite has been augmented to allow automated testing of the
944 emacs interfaces. So far, this includes basic searches, display of
945 threads, and tag manipulation. This also includes a test that a new
946 message can successfully be sent out through a (dummy) SMTP server
947 and that said message is successfully integrated into the notmuch
948 database via the FCC setting.
952 Fix potential corruption of database when "notmuch new " is interrupted.
954 Previously, an interruption of "notmuch new" would (rarely) result
955 in a corrupt database. The corruption would manifest itself by a
956 persistent error of the form:
958 document ID of 1234 has no thread ID
960 The message-adding code has been carefully audited and reworked to
961 avoid this sort of corruption regardless of when it is interrupted.
963 Fix failure with extremely long message ID headers.
965 Previously, a message with an extremely long message ID, (say, more
966 than 300 characters), would fail to be added to notmuch, (triggering
967 Xapian exceptions). This has now been fixed.
969 Fix for messages with "charset=unknown-8bit"
971 Previously, messages with this charset would cause notmuch to emit a
972 GMime warning, (which would then trip up emacs or other interfaces
973 parsing the notmuch results).
975 Fix notmuch_query_search_threads function to return NULL on any exception
977 Fix "notmuch search" to return non-zero if notmuch_query_search_threads fails
979 Previously, this command could confusingly report a Xapian
980 exception, yet still return an error code of 0. It now correctly
981 returns a failing error code of 1 in this case.
985 Fix to handle a message with a subject containing, for example "[1234]"
987 Previously, a message subject containing a sequence of digits within
988 square brackets would cause the emacs interface to mis-parse the
989 output of "notmuch search". This would result in the message being
990 mis-displayed and prevent the user from manipulating the message in
993 Fix to correctly handle message IDs containing ".."
995 The emacs interface now properly quotes message IDs to avoid a
996 Xapian bug in which the ".." within a message ID would be
997 misinterpreted as a numeric range specification.
1000 --------------------
1001 The python bindings for notmuch have been updated to work with python3.
1003 Debian-specific fixes
1004 ---------------------
1005 Fix emacs initialization so "M-x notmuch" works for users by default.
1007 Now, a new Debian user can immediately run "emacs -f notmuch" after
1008 "apt-get install notmuch". Previously, the user would have had to
1009 edit the ~/.emacs file to add "(require 'notmuch)" before this would
1012 Notmuch 0.3.1 (2010-04-27)
1013 ==========================
1016 Fix an infinite loop in "notmuch reply"
1018 This bug could be triggered by replying to a message where the
1019 user's primary email address did not appear in the To: header and
1020 the user had not configured any secondary email addresses. The bug
1021 was a simple re-use of the same iterator variable in nested loops.
1023 Fix a potential SEGV in "notmuch search"
1025 This bug could be triggered by an author name ending in a ','.
1026 Admittedly - that's almost certainly a spam email, but we never
1027 want notmuch to crash.
1031 Fix calculations for line wrapping in the primary "notmuch" view.
1033 Fix Fcc support to prompt to create a directory if the specified Fcc
1034 directory does not exist.
1038 Fix build on OpenSolaris (at least) due to missing 'extern "C"' block.
1040 Without this, the C++ sources could not find strcasestr and the
1041 final linking of notmuch would fail.
1043 Notmuch 0.3 (2010-04-27)
1044 ========================
1045 New command-line features
1046 -------------------------
1047 User-configurable tags for new messages
1049 A new "new.tags" option is available in the configuration file to
1050 determine which tags are applied to new messages. Run "notmuch
1051 setup" to generate new documentation within ~/.notmuch-config on how
1052 to specify this value.
1054 Threads search results named based on subjects that match search
1056 This means that when new mails arrived to a thread you've previously
1057 read, and the new mails have a new subject, you will see that
1058 subject in the search results rather than the old subject.
1060 Faster operation of "notmuch tag" (avoid unneeded sorting)
1062 Since the user just wants to tag all matching messages, we can make
1063 things perform a bit faster by avoiding the sort.
1065 Even Better guessing of From: header for "notmuch reply"
1067 Notmuch now looks at a number of headers when trying to figure out
1068 the best From: header to use in a reply. This is helpful if you have
1069 several configured email addresses, and you also subscribe to various
1070 mailing lists with different addresses, (so that mails you are
1071 replying to won't always include your subscribed address in the To:
1074 Indication of author names that match a search
1076 When notmuch displays threads as the result of a search, it now
1077 lists the authors that match the search before listing the other
1078 authors in the thread. It inserts a pipe '|' symbol between the last
1079 matching and first non-matching author. This is especially useful in
1080 a search that includes tag:unread. Now the authors of the unread
1081 messages in the thread are listed first.
1083 New: Python bindings
1084 --------------------
1085 Sebastian Spaeth has contributed his python bindings for the notmuch
1086 library to the central repository. These bindings were previously
1087 known as "cnotmuch" within python but have now been renamed to be
1088 accessible with a simple, and more official-looking "import notmuch".
1090 The bindings have already proven very useful as people proficient in
1091 python have been able to easily develop programs to do notmuch-based
1092 searches for email-address completion, maildir-flag synchronization,
1095 These bindings are available within the bindings/python directory, but
1096 are not yet integrated into the top-level Makefiles, nor the top-level
1097 package-building scripts. Improvements are welcome.
1099 Emacs interface improvements
1100 ----------------------------
1101 An entirely new initial view for notmuch, (friendly yet powerful)
1103 Some of us call the new view "notmuch hello" but you can get at it
1104 by simply calling "emacs -f notmuch". The new view provides a search
1105 bar where new searches can be performed. It also displays a list of
1106 recent searches, along with a button to save any of these, giving it
1107 a new name as a "saved search". Many people find these "saved
1108 searches" one of the most convenient ways of organizing their mail,
1109 (providing all of the features of "folders" in other mail clients,
1110 but without any of the disadvantages).
1112 Finally, this view can also optionally display all of the tags that
1113 exist in the database, along with a count for each tag, and a custom
1114 search of messages with that tag that's simply a click (or keypress)
1117 Note: For users that liked the original mode of "emacs -f notmuch"
1118 immediately displaying a particular search result, we
1119 recommend instead running something like:
1121 emacs --eval '(notmuch search "tag:inbox" t)'
1123 The "t" means to sort the messages in an "oldest first" order,
1124 (as notmuch would do previously by default). You can also
1125 leave that off to have your search results in "newest first"
1128 Full-featured "customize" support for configuring notmuch
1130 Notmuch now plugs in well to the emacs "customize" mode to make it
1131 much simpler to find things about the notmuch interface that can be
1132 tweaked by the user.
1134 You can get to this mode by starting at the main "Customize" menu in
1135 emacs, then browsing through "Applications", "Mail", and
1136 "Notmuch". Or you can go straight to "M-x customize-group"
1139 Once you're at the customize screen, you'll see a list of documented
1140 options that can be manipulated along with checkboxes, drop-down
1141 selectors, and text-entry boxes for configuring the various
1144 Support for doing tab-completion of email addresses
1146 This support currently relies on an external program,
1147 (notmuch-addresses), that is not yet shipped with notmuch
1148 itself. But multiple, suitable implementations of this program have
1149 already been written that generate address completions by doing
1150 notmuch searches of your email collection. For example, providing
1151 first those addresses that you have composed messages to in the
1154 One such program (implemented in python with the python bindings to
1155 notmuch) is available via:
1157 git clone http://jkr.acm.jhu.edu/git/notmuch_addresses.git
1159 Install that program as notmuch-addresses on your PATH, and then
1160 hitting TAB on a partial email address or name within the To: or Cc:
1161 line of an email message will provide matching completions.
1163 Support for file-based (Fcc) delivery of sent messages to mail store
1165 This isn't yet enabled by default. To enable this, one will have to
1166 set the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" setting within the notmuch customize
1167 screen, (see its documentation there for details). We anticipate
1168 making this automatic in a future release.
1170 New 'G' key binding to trigger mail refresh (G == "Get new mail")
1172 The 'G' key works wherever '=' works. Before refreshing the screen
1173 it calls an external program that can be used to poll email servers,
1174 run notmuch new and setup specific tags for the new emails. The
1175 script to be called should be configured with the "Notmuch Poll
1176 Script" setting in the customize interface. This script will
1177 typically invoke "notmuch new" and then perhaps several "notmuch
1180 Implement emacs message display with the JSON output from notmuch.
1182 This is much more robust than the previous implementation, (where
1183 some HTML mails and mail quoting the notmuch code with the delimiter
1184 characters in it would cause the parser to fall over).
1186 Better handling of HTML messages and MIME attachments (inline images!)
1188 Allow for any MIME parts that emacs can display to be displayed
1189 inline. This includes inline viewing of image attachments, (provided
1190 the window is large enough to fit the image at its natural size).
1192 Much more robust handling of HTML messages. Currently both text/plain
1193 and text/html alternates will be rendered next to each other. In a
1194 future release, users will be able to decide to see only one or the
1195 other representation.
1197 Each attachment now has its own button so that attachments can be
1198 saved individually (the 'w' key is still available to save all
1201 Customizable support for tidying of text/plain message content
1203 Many new functions are available for tidying up message
1204 content. These include options such as wrapping long lines,
1205 compressing duplicate blank lines, etc.
1207 Most of these are disabled by default, but can easily be enabled by
1208 clicking the available check boxes under the "Notmuch Show Insert
1209 Text/Plain Hook" within the notmuch customize screen.
1211 New support for searchable citations (even when hidden)
1213 When portions of overly-long citations are hidden, the contents of
1214 these citations will still be available for emacs' standard
1215 "incremental search" functions. When the search matches any portion
1216 of a hidden citation, the citation will become visible temporarily
1217 to display the search result.
1219 More flexible handling of header visibility
1221 As an answer to complaints from many users, the To, Cc, and Date
1222 headers of messages are no longer hidden by default. For those users
1223 that liked that these were hidden, a new "Notmuch Messages Headers
1224 Visible" option in the customize interface can be set to nil. The
1225 visibility of headers can still be toggled on a per-message basis
1226 with the 'h' keybinding.
1228 For users that don't want to see some subset of those headers, the
1229 new "Notmuch Message Headers" variable can be customized to list
1230 only those headers that should be present in the display of a message.
1232 The Return key now toggles message visibility anywhere
1234 Previously this worked only on the first summary-line of a message.
1236 Customizable formatting of search results
1238 The user can easily customize the order, width, and formatting of
1239 the various fields in a "notmuch search" buffer. See the "Notmuch
1240 Search Result Format" section of the customize interface.
1242 Generate nicer names for search buffers when using a saved search.
1244 Add a notmuch User-Agent header when sending mail from notmuch/emacs.
1246 New keybinding (M-Ret) to open all collapsed messages in a thread.
1250 Provide a new NOTMUCH_SORT_UNSORTED value for queries
1252 This can be somewhat faster when sorting simply isn't desired. For
1253 example when collecting a set of messages that will all be
1254 manipulated identically, (adding a tag, removing a tag, deleting the
1255 messages), then there's no advantage to sorting the messages by
1260 Fix to compile against GMime 2.6
1262 Previously notmuch insisted on being able to find GMime 2.4, (even
1263 though GMime 2.6 would have worked all along).
1265 Fix configure script to accept (and ignore) various standard options.
1267 For example, those that the Gentoo build scripts expect configure to
1268 accept are now all accepted.
1272 A large number of new tests for the many new features.
1274 Better display of output from failed tests.
1276 Now shows failures with diff rather than forcing the user to gaze at
1277 complete actual and expected output looking for deviation.
1279 Notmuch 0.2 (2010-04-16)
1280 ========================
1281 This is the second release of the notmuch mail system, with actual
1282 detailed release notes this time!
1284 This release consists of a number of minor new features that make
1285 notmuch more pleasant to use, and a few fairly major bug fixes.
1287 We didn't quite hit our release target of "about a week" from the 0.1
1288 release, (0.2 is happening 11 days after 0.1), but we hope to do
1289 better for next week. Look forward to some major features coming to
1290 notmuch in subsequent releases.
1296 Better guessing of From: header.
1298 Notmuch now tries harder to guess which configured address should be
1299 used as the From: line in a "notmuch reply". It will examine the
1300 Received: headers if it fails to find any configured address in To:
1301 or Cc:. This allows it to often choose the correct address even when
1302 replying to a message sent to a mailing list, and not directly to a
1305 Make "notmuch count" with no arguments count all messages
1307 Previously, it was hard to construct a search term that was
1308 guaranteed to match all messages.
1310 Provide a new special-case search term of "*" to match all messages.
1312 This can be used in any command accepting a search term, such as
1313 "notmuch search '*'". Note that you'll want to take care that the
1314 shell doesn't expand * against the current files. And note that the
1315 support for "*" is a special case. It's only meaningful as a single
1316 search term and loses its special meaning when combined with any
1319 Automatically detect thread connections even when a parent message is
1322 Previously, if two or more message were received with a common
1323 parent, but that parent was not received, then these messages would
1324 not be recognized as belonging to the same thread. This is now fixed
1325 so that such messages are properly connected in a thread.
1329 Fix potential data loss in "notmuch new" with SIGINT
1331 One code path in "notmuch new" was not properly handling
1332 SIGINT. Previously, this could lead to messages being removed from
1333 the database (and their tags being lost) if the user pressed
1334 Control-C while "notmuch new" was working.
1336 Fix segfault when a message includes a MIME part that is empty.
1338 Fix handling of non-ASCII characters with --format=json
1340 Previously, characters outside the range of 7-bit ASCII were
1341 silently dropped from the JSON output. This led to corrupted display
1342 of utf-8 content in the upcoming notmuch web-based frontends.
1344 Fix headers to be properly decoded in "notmuch reply"
1346 Previously, the user might see:
1348 Subject: Re: =?iso-8859-2?q?Rozlu=E8ka?=
1352 Subject: Re: Rozlučka
1354 The former text is properly encoded to be RFC-compliant SMTP, will
1355 be sent correctly, and will be properly decoded by the
1356 recipient. But the user trying to edit the reply would likely be
1357 unable to read or edit that field in its encoded form.
1359 Emacs client features
1360 ---------------------
1361 Show the last few lines of citations as well as the first few lines.
1363 It's often the case that the last sentence of a citation is what is
1364 being replied to directly, so the last few lines are often much more
1365 important. The number of lines shown at the beginning and end of any
1366 citation can be configured, (notmuch-show-citation-lines-prefix and
1367 notmuch-show-citation-lines-suffix).
1369 The '+' and '-' commands in the search view can now add and remove
1372 Selective bulk tagging is now possible by selecting a region of
1373 threads and then using either the '+' or '-' keybindings. Bulk
1374 tagging is still available for all threads matching the current
1375 search with the '*' binding.
1377 More meaningful buffer names for thread-view buffers.
1379 Notmuch now uses the Subject of the thread as the buffer
1380 name. Previously it was using the thread ID, which is a meaningless
1383 Provide for customized colors of threads in search view based on tags.
1385 See the documentation of notmuch-search-line-faces, (or us "M-x
1386 customize" and browse to the "notmuch" group within "Applications"
1387 and "Mail"), for details on how to configure this colorization.
1389 Build-system features
1390 ---------------------
1391 Add support to properly build libnotmuch on Darwin systems (OS X).
1393 Add support to configure for many standard options.
1395 We include actual support for:
1397 --includedir --mandir --sysconfdir
1399 And accept and silently ignore several more:
1401 --build --infodir --libexecdir --localstatedir
1402 --disable-maintainer-mode --disable-dependency-tracking
1404 Install emacs client in "make install" rather than requiring a
1405 separate "make install-emacs".
1407 Automatically compute versions numbers between releases.
1409 This support uses the git-describe notation, so a version such as
1410 0.1-144-g43cbbfc indicates a version that is 144 commits since the
1411 0.1 release and is available as git commit "43cbbfc".
1413 Add a new "make test" target to run the test suite and actually verify
1416 Notmuch 0.1 (2010-04-05)
1417 ========================
1418 This is the first release of the notmuch mail system.
1420 It includes the libnotmuch library, the notmuch command-line
1421 interface, and an emacs-based interface to notmuch.
1423 Note: Notmuch will work best with Xapian 1.0.18 (or later) or Xapian
1424 1.1.4 (or later). Previous versions of Xapian (whether 1.0 or 1.1) had
1425 a performance bug that made notmuch very slow when modifying
1426 tags. This would cause distracting pauses when reading mail while
1427 notmuch would wait for Xapian when removing the "inbox" and "unread"
1428 tags from messages in a thread.