1 Notmuch 0.10.1 (2011-11-25)
2 ===========================
9 Argument processing changes in 0.10 introduced a bug where "notmuch
10 --help" crashed while "notmuch help" worked fine. This is fixed in
13 Notmuch 0.10 (2011-11-23)
14 =========================
16 New build and testing features
17 ------------------------------
19 Emacs tests are now done in dtach. This means that dtach is now
20 needed to run the notmuch test suite, at least until the checking for
21 prerequisites is improved.
23 Full test coverage of the stashing feature in Emacs.
25 New command-line features
26 -------------------------
28 Add "notmuch restore --accumulate" option
30 The --accumulate switch causes the union of the existing and new tags to be
31 applied, instead of replacing each message's tags as they are read in from
34 Add search terms to "notmuch dump"
36 The dump command now takes an optional search term much like notmuch
37 search/show/tag. The output file argument of dump is deprecated in
38 favour of using stdout.
40 Add "notmuch search" --offset and --limit options
42 The search command now takes options --offset=[-]N and --limit=N to limit
43 the number of results shown.
45 Add "notmuch count --output" option
47 The count command is now capable of counting threads in addition to
48 messages. This is selected using the new --output=(threads|messages) option.
53 Add tab-completion for notmuch-search and notmuch-search-filter
55 These functions now support completion tags for query parts
58 Turn "id:MSG-ID" links into buttons associated with notmuch searches
60 Text of the form "id:MSG-ID" in mails is now a clickable button that
61 opens a notmuch search for the given message id.
63 Add keybinding ('c I') for stashing Message-ID's without an id: prefix
65 Reduces manual labour when stashing them for use outside notmuch.
67 Do not query on notmuch-search exit
69 It is harmless to kill the external notmuch process, so the user
70 is no longer interrogated when they interrupt a search.
75 Emacs now constructs large search buffers more efficiently
77 Search avoids opening and parsing message files
79 We now store more information in the database so search no longer
80 has to open every message file to get basic headers. This can
81 improve search speed by as much as 10X, but taking advantage of this
82 requires a database rebuild:
84 notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
85 # Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
87 notmuch restore notmuch.dump
89 New collection of add-on tools
90 ------------------------------
92 The source directory "contrib" contains tools built on notmuch. These
93 tools are not part of notmuch, and you should check their individual
94 licenses. Feel free to report problems with them to the notmuch
97 nmbug - share tags with a given prefix
99 nmbug helps maintain a git repo containing all tags with a given
100 prefix (by default "notmuch::"). Tags can be shared by commiting
101 them to git in one location and restoring in another.
103 Notmuch 0.9 (2011-10-01)
104 ========================
106 New, general features
107 ---------------------
109 Correct handling of interruptions during "notmuch new"
111 "notmuch new" now operates as a series of small, self-consistent
112 transactions, so it can correctly resume after an interruption or
113 crash. Previously, interruption could lose existing tags, fail to
114 detect messages on resume, or leave the database in a state
115 temporarily or permanently inconsistent with the mail store.
122 notmuch_database_begin_atomic and notmuch_database_end_atomic allow
123 multiple database operations to be performed atomically.
125 notmuch_database_find_message_by_filename does exactly what it says.
129 notmuch_database_find_message (and n_d_f_m_by_filename) now return
130 a status indicator and uses an output parameter for the
131 message. This change required changing the SONAME of libnotmuch to
134 Python bindings changes
135 -----------------------
137 - Re-encode python unicode objects to utf-8 before passing back to
139 - Support Database().begin_atomic()/end_atomic()
140 - Support Database().find_message_by_filename()
141 NB! This needs a db opened in READ-WRITE mode currently, or it will crash
142 the python process. The is a limitation (=bug) of the underlying libnotmuch.
143 - Fixes where we would not throw NotmuchErrors when we should (Justus Winter)
144 - Update for n_d_find_message* API changes (see above).
146 Ruby bindings changes
147 ---------------------
149 - Wrap new library functions notmuch_database_{begin,end}_atomic.
150 - Add new exception Notmuch::UnbalancedAtomicError.
151 - Rename destroy to destroy! according to Ruby naming conventions.
152 - Update for n_d_find_message* API changes (see above).
157 * Add gpg callback to crypto sigstatus buttons to retrieve/refresh
159 * Add notmuch-show-refresh-view function (and corresponding binding)
160 to refresh the view of a notmuch-show buffer.
162 Reply formatting cleanup
163 ------------------------
165 "notmuch reply" no longer includes notification that non-leafnode
166 MIME parts are being suppressed.
168 Notmuch 0.8 (2011-09-10)
169 ========================
171 Improved handling of message/rfc822 parts
173 Both in the CLI and the emacs interface. Output of rfc822 parts now
174 includes the primary headers, as well as the body and all subparts.
175 Output of the completely raw rfc822-formatted message, including all
176 headers, is unfortunately not yet supported (but hopefully will be
179 Improved Build system portability
181 Certain parts of the shell script generating notmuch.sym were
182 specific to the GNU versions of sed and nm. The new version should
183 be more portable to e.g. OpenBSD.
185 Documentation update for Ruby bindings
187 Added documentation, typo fixes, and improved support for rdoc.
189 Unicode, iterator, PEP8 changes for python bindings
191 - PEP8 (code formatting) changes for python files.
192 - Remove Tags.__len__ ; see 0.6 release notes for motivation.
193 - Decode headers as UTF8, encode (unicode) database paths as UTF8.
195 Notmuch 0.7 (2011-08-01)
196 ========================
198 Vim interface improvements
199 --------------------------
201 Jason Woofenden provided a number of bug fixes for the Vim interface
203 * fix citation/signature fold lengths
204 * fix cig/cit parsing within multipart/*
205 * fix on-screen instructions for show-signature
206 * fix from list reformatting in search view
207 * fix space key: now archives (did opposite)
209 Uwe Kleine-König contributed
211 * use full path for sendmail/doc fix
212 * fix compose temp file name
214 Python Bindings changes
215 -----------------------
217 Sebastian Spaeth contributed two changes related to unicode and UTF8:
219 * message tags are now explicitly unicode
220 * query string is encoded as a UTF8 byte string
222 Build-System improvements
223 ------------------------
225 Generate notmuch.sym after the relevant object files
227 This fixes a bug in parallel building. Thanks to Thomas Jost for the
230 Notmuch 0.6.1 (2011-07-17)
231 ==========================
236 Re-export Xapian exception typeinfo symbols.
238 It turned out our aggressive symbol hiding caused problems for
239 people running gcc 4.4.5.
241 Notmuch 0.6 (2011-07-01)
242 =======================
243 New, general features
244 ---------------------
245 Folder-based searching
247 Notmuch queries can now include a search term to match the
248 directories in which mail files are stored (within the mail
249 storage). The syntax is as follows:
253 For example, one might use things such as:
259 to match any path containing a directory "spam", "work/todo", or
260 containing a directory starting with "2011-", respectively.
262 This feature is particularly useful for users of delivery-agent
263 software (such as procmail or maildrop) that is filtering mail and
264 delivering it to particular folders, or users of systems such as
265 Gmail that use filesystem directories to indicate message tags.
267 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
268 notmuch will be searchable with folder: terms. In order to enable
269 this feature for all mail, the entire notmuch index will need to be
272 notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
273 # Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
275 notmuch restore notmuch.dump
279 Both the command line interface and the emacs-interface have new
280 support for PGP/MIME, detailed below. Thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor
281 and Jameson Graef Rollins for making this happen.
283 New, automatic tags: "signed" and "encrypted"
285 These tags will automatically be applied to messages containing
286 multipart/signed and multipart/encrypted parts.
288 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
289 notmuch will receive these tags.
291 New command-line features
292 -------------------------
293 Add new "notmuch show --verify" option for signature verification
295 This option instruct notmuch to verify the signature of
296 PGP/MIME-signed parts.
298 Add new "notmuch show --decrypt" and "notmuch reply --decrypt" options
300 This option instructs notmuch to decrypt PGP/MIME-encrypted parts.
301 Note that this feature currently requires gpg-agent and a passphrase entry
302 tool (e.g. pinentry-gtk or pinentry-curses).
304 Proper nesting of multipart parts in "notmuch show" output
306 MIME parts are now display with proper nesting to reflect original
307 MIME hierarchy of a message. This allows clients to correctly
308 analyze the MIME structure, (such as, for example, determining to
309 which parts a signature part applies).
311 Add new "notmuch show --part" option
313 This is a replacement for the older "notmuch part" command, (which
314 is now deprecated—it should still work as always, but is no longer
315 documented). Putting part output under "notmuch show" allows for all
316 of the "notmuch show" options to be applied when extracting a single
317 part, (such as --format=json for extracting a message part with JSON
320 Deprecate "notmuch search-tags", (in favor of "notmuch search --output=tags *")
322 The "notmuch search-tags" sub-command has been redundant since the
323 addition of the --output=tags option to "notmuch search". We now
324 make that more clear by deprecating "notmuch search-tags", (dropping
325 it from the documentation). We do continue to support the old syntax
326 by translating it internally to the new call.
328 Performance improvements
329 ------------------------
330 Faster searches (by doing fewer searches to construct threads)
332 Whenever a user asks for search results as threads, notmuch first
333 performs a search for messages matching the query, then performs
334 additional searches to find other messages in the resulting threads.
336 Removing inefficiencies and redundancies in these secondary searches
337 results in a measured speedups of 1.5x for a typical search.
339 Faster searches (by doing fewer passes to gather message data)
341 Optimizing Xapian data access patterns (using a single pass to get
342 all message-document data rather than a pass for each data type)
343 results in a measured speedup of 1.7x for a typical search.
345 The benefits of this optimization combine with the preceding
346 optimization. With both in place, Austin Clements measured a speedup
347 of 2.5x for a search of all messages in his inbox (was 4.5s, now
348 1.8s). Thanks, Austin!
350 Faster initial indexing
352 More efficient indexing of new messages results in a measured
353 speedup of 1.4x for the initial indexing of 3 GB of mail (1h 14m
354 rather than 1h 46m). Thanks to Austin Clements and Michal Sojka.
356 Make "notmuch new" faster for unchanged directories
358 Optimizing to not do any further examinations of sub-directories
359 when the filesystem indicates that a directory is unchanged from the
360 last "notmuch new" results in measured speedups of 8.5 for the "No
361 new mail" case, (was 0.77s, now 0.09s). Thanks to Karel Zak.
363 New emacs-interface features
364 ----------------------------
366 Support for PGP/MIME (GnuPG)
368 Automatically indicate validity of signatures for multipart/signed
369 messages. Automatically display decrypted content for
370 multipart/encrypted messages. See the emacs variable
371 notmuch-crypto-process-mime for more information. Note that this
372 needs gpg-agent and a pinentry tool just as the command line tools.
373 Also note there is no support SMIME yet.
375 Output of pipe command is now displayed if pipe command fails
377 This is extremely useful in the common use case of piping a patch to
378 "git am". If git fails to cleanly merge the patch the error messages
379 from the failed merge are now clearly displayed to the user, (where
380 previously they were silently hidden from the user).
382 User-selectable From address
384 A user can choose which configured email addresses should be used as
385 the From address whenever composing a new message. To do so, simply
386 press C-u before the command which will open a new message. Emacs
387 will prompt for the from address to use.
389 The user can customize the "Notmuch Identities" setting in the
390 notmuch customize group in order to use addresses other than those in
391 the notmuch configuration file if desired.
393 The user can also choose to always be prompted for the from address
394 when composing a new message (without having to use C-u) by setting
395 the "Notmuch Always Prompt For Sender" option in the notmuch
398 Hiding of repeated subjects in collapsed thread view
400 In notmuch-show mode, if a collapsed message has the same subject as
401 its parent, the subject is not shown.
403 Automatic detection and hiding of original message in top-posted message
405 When a message contains a line looking something like:
407 ----- Original Message -----
409 emacs hides this and all subsequent lines as an "original message",
410 (allowing the user to click or press enter on the "original message"
411 button to display it again). This makes the handling of top-posted
412 citations work much like conventional citations.
414 New hooks for running code when tags are modified
416 Some users want to perform additional actions whenever a particular
417 tag is added/removed from a message. This could be used to, for
418 example, interface with some external spam-recognition training
419 tool. To facilitate this, two new hooks are added which can be
420 modified in the following settings of the notmuch customize group:
422 Notmuch Before Tag Hook
423 Notmuch After Tag Hook
425 New optional support for hiding some multipart/alternative parts
427 Many emails are sent with redundant content within a
428 multipart/alternative group (such as a text/plain part as well as a
429 text/html part). Users can configure the setting:
431 Notmuch Show All Multipart/Alternative Parts
433 to "off" in the notmuch customize group to have the interface
434 automatically hide some part alternatives (such as text/html
435 parts). This new part hiding is not configured by default yet
436 because there's not yet a simple way to re-display such a hidden
437 part if it is not actually redundant with a displayed part.
439 Better rendering of text/x-vcalendar parts
441 These parts are now displayed in a format suitable for use with the
444 Avoid getting confused by Subject and Author fields with newline characters
446 Replacing all characters with ASCII code less than 32 with a question mark.
448 Cleaner display of From line in email messages (remove double quotes,
449 and drop "name" if it's actually just a repeat of the email address).
451 Vim interface improvements
452 --------------------------
453 Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface:
455 * Using sendmail directly rather than mailx,
456 * Implementing archive in show view
457 * Add support to mark as read in show and search views
458 * Add delete commands
461 Bindings improvements
462 ---------------------
463 Ruby bindings are now much more complete
465 Including QUERY.sort, QUERY.to_s, MESSAGE.maildir_flags_to_tags,
466 MESSAGE.tags_to_maildir_flags, and MESSAGE.get_filenames
468 * Python bindings have been updated and extended
469 (docs online at http://packages.python.org/notmuch/)
472 - Message().get_filenames(),
473 - Message().tags_to_maildir_flags(),Message().maildir_flags_to_tags()
474 - list(Threads()) and list(Messages) works now
476 - Message().__cmp__() and __hash__()
477 These allow, for example:
480 As well as set arithmetic on Messages():
482 s1, s2= set(msgs1), set(msgs2)
487 - len(Messages()) as it exhausted the iterator.
488 Use len(list(Messages())) or
489 Query.count_messages() to get the length.
491 Added initial Go bindings in bindings/go
493 New build-system features
494 -------------------------
495 Added support for building in a directory other than the source directory
497 This can be used with the widely-supported idiom of simply running
498 the configure script from some other directory:
505 Fix to save configure options for future, implicit runs of configure
507 When a user updates the source (such as with "git pull") calling
508 "make" may cause an automatic re-run of the configure script. When
509 this happens, the configure script will automatically be called with
510 the same options the user originally passed in the most-recent
511 manual invocation of configure.
513 New test-suite feature
514 ----------------------
515 Binary for bash for running test suite now located via PATH.
517 The notmuch test suite requires a fairly recent version of bash (>=
518 bash 4). As some systems supply an older version of bash at
519 /bin/bash, the test suite is now updated to search $PATH to locate
520 the bash binary. This allows users of systems with old /bin/bash to
521 simply install bash >= 4 somewhere on $PATH before /bin and then use
524 Support for testing output with a trailing newline.
526 Previously, some tests would fail to notice a difference in the
527 presence/absence of a trailing newline in a program output, (which
528 has led to bugs in the past). Now, carefully-written tests (using
529 test_expect_equal_file rather than test_expect_equal) will detect
530 any change in the presence/absence of a trailing newline. Many tests
531 are updated to take advantage of this.
533 Avoiding accessing user's $HOME while running test suite
535 The test suite now carefully creates its own HOME directory. This
536 allows the test suite to be run with no existing HOME directory, (as
537 some build systems apparently do), and avoids test-suite differences
538 due to configuration files in the users HOME directory.
543 Output *all* files for "notmuch search --output=files"
545 For the cases where multiple files have the same Message ID,
546 previous versions of notmuch would output only one such file. This
547 command is now fixed to correctly output all files.
549 Fixed spurious search results from "overlapped" indexing of addresses
551 This fixed a bug where a search for:
553 to:user@elsewhere.com
555 would incorrectly match a message sent:
557 To: user@example,com, someone@elsewhere.com
559 Fix --output=json when search has no results
561 A bug present since notmuch 0.4 had caused searches with no results
562 to produce an invalid json object. This is now fixed to cleanly
563 return a valid json object representing an empty array "[]" as
566 fix the automatic detection of the From address for "notmuch reply"
567 from the Received headers in some cases.
569 Fix core dump on DragonFlyBSD due to -1 return value from
570 sysconf(_SC_GETPW_R_SIZE_MAX).
572 Cleaned up several memory leaks
574 Eliminated a few, rare segmentation faults and a double-free.
576 Fix libnotmuch library to only export notmuch API functions
578 Previous release of the notmuch library also exported some Xapian
579 C++ exception type symbols. These were never part of the library
580 interface and were never intended to be exported.
582 Emacs-interface bug fixes
583 -------------------------
584 Display any unexpected output or errors from "notmuch search" invocations
586 Previously any misformatted output or trailing error messages were
587 silently ignored. This output is now clearly displayed. This fix was
588 very helpful in identifying and fixing the bug described below.
590 Fix bug where some threads would be missing from large search results
592 When a search returned a "large" number of results, the emacs
593 interface was incorrectly dropping one thread every time the output
594 of the "notmuch search" process spanned the emacs read-buffer. This
597 Avoid re-compression of .gz files (and similar) when saving attachment
599 Emacs was being too clever for its own good and trying to
600 re-compress pre-compressed .gz files when saving such attachments
601 (potentially corrupting the attachment). The emacs interface is
602 fixed to avoid this bug.
604 Fix hiding of a message when a previously-hidden citation is visible
606 Previously the citation would remain visible in this case. This is
607 fixed so that hiding a message hides all parts.
609 Notmuch 0.5 (2010-11-11)
610 ========================
611 New, general features
612 ---------------------
613 Maildir-flag synchronization
615 Notmuch now knows how to synchronize flags in maildir filenames with
616 tags in the notmuch database. The following flag/tag mappings are
625 'S' unread (added when 'S' flag is not present)
627 The synchronization occurs in both directions, (for example, adding
628 the 'S' flag to a file will cause the "unread" tag to be added, and
629 adding the "replied" tag to a message will cause the file to be
630 renamed with an 'R' flag).
632 This synchronization is enabled by default for users of the
633 command-line interface, (though only files in directories named
634 "cur" or "new" will be renamed). It can be disabled by setting the
635 new maildir.synchronize_flags option in the configuration file. For
638 notmuch config set maildir.synchronize_flags false
640 Users upgrading may also want to run "notmuch setup" once (just
641 accept the existing configuration) to get a new, nicely-commented
642 [maildir] section added to the configuration file.
644 For users of the notmuch library, the new synchronization
645 functionality is available with the following two new functions:
647 notmuch_message_maildir_flags_to_tags
648 notmuch_message_tags_to_maildir_flags
650 It is anticipated that future improvements to this support will
651 allow for safe synchronization of the 'T' flag with the "deleted"
652 tag, as well as support for custom flag/tag mappings.
656 Support for querying multiple filenames for a single message
658 It is common for the mailstore to contain multiple files with the
659 same message ID. Previously, notmuch would always hide these
660 duplicate files, (returning a single, arbitrary filename with
661 notmuch_message_get_filename).
663 With this release, library users can access all filenames for a
664 message with the new function:
666 notmuch_message_get_filenames
668 Together with notmuch_filenames_valid, notmuch_filenames_get, and
669 notmuch_filenames_move_to_next it is now possible to iterate over
670 all available filenames for a given message.
672 New command-line features
673 -------------------------
674 New "notmuch show --format=raw" for getting at original email contents
676 This new feature allows for a fully-functional email client to be
677 built on top of the notmuch command-line without needing any direct
678 access to the mail store itself.
680 For example, it's now possible to run "emacs -f notmuch" on a local
681 machine with only ssh access to the mail store/notmuch database. To
682 do this, simply set the notmuch-command variable in emacs to the
683 name of a script containing:
685 ssh user@host notmuch "$@"
687 If the ssh client has enabled connection sharing (ControlMaster
688 option in OpenSSH), the emacs interface can be quite responsive this
693 Fix "notmuch search" to print nothing when nothing matches
695 The 0.4 release had a bug in which:
697 notmuch search <expression-with-no-matches>
699 would produce a single blank line of output, (where previous
700 versions would produce no output. This fix also causes a change in
701 the --format=json output, (which would previously produce "[]" and
702 now produces nothing).
704 Emacs interface improvements
705 ----------------------------
706 Fix to allow pipe ('|') command to work when using notmuch over ssh
708 Fix count of lines in hidden signatures.
710 Omit repeated subject lines in (collapsed) thread display.
712 Display current thread subject in a header line.
714 Provide a "c i" binding to copy a thread ID from the search view.
716 Allow for notmuch-fcc-dirs to have a value of nil.
718 Also, the more complex form of notmuch-fcc-dirs now has a slightly
719 different format. It no longer has a special first-element, fallback
720 string. Instead it's now a list of cons cells where the car of each
721 cell is a regular expression to be matched against the sender
722 address, and the cdr is the name of a folder to use for an FCC. So
723 the old fallback behavior can be achieved by including a final cell
724 of (".*" . "default-fcc-folder").
726 Vim interface improvements
727 --------------------------
728 Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface.
730 These include optimizations, support for newer versions of vim, fixed
731 support for sending mail on modern systems, new commands, and
736 Added initial ruby bindings in bindings/ruby
738 Notmuch 0.4 (2010-11-01)
739 ========================
740 New command-line features
741 -------------------------
742 notmuch search --output=(summary|threads|messages|tags|files)
744 This new option allows for particular items to be returned from
745 notmuch searches. The "summary" option is the default and behaves
746 just as "notmuch search" has historically behaved.
748 The new option values allow for thread IDs, message IDs, lists of
749 tags, and lists of filenames to be returned from searches. It is
750 expected that this new option will be very useful in shell
751 scripts. For example:
753 for file in $(notmuch search --output=files <search-terms>); do
754 <operations-on> "$file"
757 notmuch show --format=mbox <search-specification>
759 This new option allows for the messages matching a search
760 specification to be presented as an mbox. Specifically the "mboxrd"
761 format is used which allows for reversible quoting of lines
762 beginning with "From ". A reader should remove a single '>' from the
763 beginning of all lines beginning with one or more '>' characters
764 followed by the 5 characters "From ".
766 notmuch config [get|set] <section>.<item> [value ...]
768 The new top-level "config" command allows for any value in the
769 notmuch configuration file to be queried or set to a new value. Both
770 single-valued and multi-valued items are supported, as our any
771 custom items stored in the configuration file.
773 Avoid setting Bcc header in "notmuch reply"
775 We decided that this was a bit heavy-handed as the actual mail
776 user-agent should be responsible for setting any Bcc option. Also,
777 see below for the notmuch/emacs user-agent now setting an Fcc by
778 default rather than Bcc.
782 Add notmuch_query_get_query_string and notmuch_query_get_sort
784 These are simply functions for querying properties of a
785 notmuch_query_t object.
789 Enable Fcc of all sent messages by default (to "sent" directory)
791 All messages sent from the emacs interface will now be saved to the
792 notmuch mail store where they will be incorporated to the database
793 by the next "notmuch new". By default, messages are saved to the
794 "sent" directory at the top-level of the mail store. This directory
795 can be customized by means of the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" option in the
796 notmuch customize interface.
798 Ability to all open messages in a thread to a pipe
800 Historically, the '|' keybinding allows for piping a single message
801 to an external command. Now, by prefixing this key with a prefix
802 argument, (for example, by pressing "Control-U |"), all open
803 messages in the current thread will be sent to the external command.
805 Optional support for detecting inline patches
807 This hook is disabled by default but can be enabled with a checkbox
808 under "Notmuch Show Insert Text/Plain Hook" in the notmuch customize
809 interface. It allows for inline patches to be detected and treated
810 as if they were attachments, (with context-sensitive highlighting).
812 Automatically tag messages as "replied" when sending a reply
814 Messages replied to within the emacs interface will now be tagged as
815 "replied". This feature can easily be customized to add or remove
816 other tags as well. For example, a user might use a tag of
817 "needs-reply" and can configure this feature to automatically remove
818 that tag when replying. See "Notmuch Message Mark Replied" in the
819 notmuch customize interface.
821 Allow search-result color specifications to overlay each other
823 For example, one tag can specify the background color of matching
824 lines, while another can specify the foreground. With this change,
825 both settings will now be visible simultaneously, (which was not the
826 case in previous releases). See "Notmuch Search Line Faces" in the
827 notmuch customize interface.
829 Make hidden author names still available for incremental search.
831 When there is insufficient space to display all authors of a thread
832 in search results, the names of hidden authors are now still made
833 available to emacs' incremental search commands. As the user
834 searches, matching lines will temporarily expand to show the hidden
837 New binding of Control-TAB (works like TAB in reverse)
839 Many notmuch nodes already use TAB to navigate forward through
840 various items allowing actions, (message headers, email attachments,
841 etc.). The new Control-TAB binding operates similarly but in the
844 New build-system features
845 -------------------------
846 Various portability fixes have been applied
848 These include fixes for build failures on at least Solaris, FreeBSD,
849 and Fedora systems. We're hopeful that the notmuch code base is now
850 more portable than ever before.
852 Arrange for libnotmuch to be found automatically after make install
854 The notmuch build system is now careful to help the user avoid
855 errors of the form "libnotmuch.so could not be found" immediately
856 after installing. This support takes two forms:
858 1. If the library is installed to a system directory,
859 (configured in /etc/ld.so.conf), then "make install" will
860 automatically run ldconfig.
862 2. If the library is installed to a non-system directory, the
863 build system adds a DR_RUNPATH entry to the final binary
864 pointing to the directory to which the library is installed.
866 When this support works, the user should be able to run notmuch
867 immediately after "make install", without any errors trying to find
868 the notmuch library, and without having to manually set environment
869 variables such as LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
871 Check compiler/linker options before using them
873 The configure script now carefully checks that any desired
874 compilation options, (whether for enabling compiler warnings, or for
875 embedding rpath, etc.), are supported. Only supported options are
876 used in the resulting Makefile.
878 New test-suite features
879 -----------------------
880 New modularization of test suite.
882 Thanks to a gracious relicensing of the test-suite infrastructure
883 from the git project, notmuch now has a modular test suite. This
884 provides the ability to run individual sections of the test suite
885 rather than the whole things. It also provides better summary of
886 test results, with support for tests that are expected to fail
887 (BROKEN and FIXED) in addition to PASS and FAIL. Finally, it makes
888 it easy to run the test suite within valgrind (pass --valgrind to
889 notmuch-test or to any sub-script) which has been very useful.
891 New testing of emacs interface.
893 The test suite has been augmented to allow automated testing of the
894 emacs interfaces. So far, this includes basic searches, display of
895 threads, and tag manipulation. This also includes a test that a new
896 message can successfully be sent out through a (dummy) SMTP server
897 and that said message is successfully integrated into the notmuch
898 database via the FCC setting.
902 Fix potential corruption of database when "notmuch new " is interrupted.
904 Previously, an interruption of "notmuch new" would (rarely) result
905 in a corrupt database. The corruption would manifest itself by a
906 persistent error of the form:
908 document ID of 1234 has no thread ID
910 The message-adding code has been carefully audited and reworked to
911 avoid this sort of corruption regardless of when it is interrupted.
913 Fix failure with extremely long message ID headers.
915 Previously, a message with an extremely long message ID, (say, more
916 than 300 characters), would fail to be added to notmuch, (triggering
917 Xapian exceptions). This has now been fixed.
919 Fix for messages with "charset=unknown-8bit"
921 Previously, messages with this charset would cause notmuch to emit a
922 GMime warning, (which would then trip up emacs or other interfaces
923 parsing the notmuch results).
925 Fix notmuch_query_search_threads function to return NULL on any exception
927 Fix "notmuch search" to return non-zero if notmuch_query_search_threads fails
929 Previously, this command could confusingly report a Xapian
930 exception, yet still return an error code of 0. It now correctly
931 returns a failing error code of 1 in this case.
935 Fix to handle a message with a subject containing, for example "[1234]"
937 Previously, a message subject containing a sequence of digits within
938 square brackets would cause the emacs interface to mis-parse the
939 output of "notmuch search". This would result in the message being
940 mis-displayed and prevent the user from manipulating the message in
943 Fix to correctly handle message IDs containing ".."
945 The emacs interface now properly quotes message IDs to avoid a
946 Xapian bug in which the ".." within a message ID would be
947 misinterpreted as a numeric range specification.
951 The python bindings for notmuch have been updated to work with python3.
953 Debian-specific fixes
954 ---------------------
955 Fix emacs initialization so "M-x notmuch" works for users by default.
957 Now, a new Debian user can immediately run "emacs -f notmuch" after
958 "apt-get install notmuch". Previously, the user would have had to
959 edit the ~/.emacs file to add "(require 'notmuch)" before this would
962 Notmuch 0.3.1 (2010-04-27)
963 ==========================
966 Fix an infinite loop in "notmuch reply"
968 This bug could be triggered by replying to a message where the
969 user's primary email address did not appear in the To: header and
970 the user had not configured any secondary email addresses. The bug
971 was a simple re-use of the same iterator variable in nested loops.
973 Fix a potential SEGV in "notmuch search"
975 This bug could be triggered by an author name ending in a ','.
976 Admittedly - that's almost certainly a spam email, but we never
977 want notmuch to crash.
981 Fix calculations for line wrapping in the primary "notmuch" view.
983 Fix Fcc support to prompt to create a directory if the specified Fcc
984 directory does not exist.
988 Fix build on OpenSolaris (at least) due to missing 'extern "C"' block.
990 Without this, the C++ sources could not find strcasestr and the
991 final linking of notmuch would fail.
993 Notmuch 0.3 (2010-04-27)
994 ========================
995 New command-line features
996 -------------------------
997 User-configurable tags for new messages
999 A new "new.tags" option is available in the configuration file to
1000 determine which tags are applied to new messages. Run "notmuch
1001 setup" to generate new documentation within ~/.notmuch-config on how
1002 to specify this value.
1004 Threads search results named based on subjects that match search
1006 This means that when new mails arrived to a thread you've previously
1007 read, and the new mails have a new subject, you will see that
1008 subject in the search results rather than the old subject.
1010 Faster operation of "notmuch tag" (avoid unneeded sorting)
1012 Since the user just wants to tag all matching messages, we can make
1013 things perform a bit faster by avoiding the sort.
1015 Even Better guessing of From: header for "notmuch reply"
1017 Notmuch now looks at a number of headers when trying to figure out
1018 the best From: header to use in a reply. This is helpful if you have
1019 several configured email addresses, and you also subscribe to various
1020 mailing lists with different addresses, (so that mails you are
1021 replying to won't always include your subscribed address in the To:
1024 Indication of author names that match a search
1026 When notmuch displays threads as the result of a search, it now
1027 lists the authors that match the search before listing the other
1028 authors in the thread. It inserts a pipe '|' symbol between the last
1029 matching and first non-matching author. This is especially useful in
1030 a search that includes tag:unread. Now the authors of the unread
1031 messages in the thread are listed first.
1033 New: Python bindings
1034 --------------------
1035 Sebastian Spaeth has contributed his python bindings for the notmuch
1036 library to the central repository. These bindings were previously
1037 known as "cnotmuch" within python but have now been renamed to be
1038 accessible with a simple, and more official-looking "import notmuch".
1040 The bindings have already proven very useful as people proficient in
1041 python have been able to easily develop programs to do notmuch-based
1042 searches for email-address completion, maildir-flag synchronization,
1045 These bindings are available within the bindings/python directory, but
1046 are not yet integrated into the top-level Makefiles, nor the top-level
1047 package-building scripts. Improvements are welcome.
1049 Emacs interface improvements
1050 ----------------------------
1051 An entirely new initial view for notmuch, (friendly yet powerful)
1053 Some of us call the new view "notmuch hello" but you can get at it
1054 by simply calling "emacs -f notmuch". The new view provides a search
1055 bar where new searches can be performed. It also displays a list of
1056 recent searches, along with a button to save any of these, giving it
1057 a new name as a "saved search". Many people find these "saved
1058 searches" one of the most convenient ways of organizing their mail,
1059 (providing all of the features of "folders" in other mail clients,
1060 but without any of the disadvantages).
1062 Finally, this view can also optionally display all of the tags that
1063 exist in the database, along with a count for each tag, and a custom
1064 search of messages with that tag that's simply a click (or keypress)
1067 Note: For users that liked the original mode of "emacs -f notmuch"
1068 immediately displaying a particular search result, we
1069 recommend instead running something like:
1071 emacs --eval '(notmuch search "tag:inbox" t)'
1073 The "t" means to sort the messages in an "oldest first" order,
1074 (as notmuch would do previously by default). You can also
1075 leave that off to have your search results in "newest first"
1078 Full-featured "customize" support for configuring notmuch
1080 Notmuch now plugs in well to the emacs "customize" mode to make it
1081 much simpler to find things about the notmuch interface that can be
1082 tweaked by the user.
1084 You can get to this mode by starting at the main "Customize" menu in
1085 emacs, then browsing through "Applications", "Mail", and
1086 "Notmuch". Or you can go straight to "M-x customize-group"
1089 Once you're at the customize screen, you'll see a list of documented
1090 options that can be manipulated along with checkboxes, drop-down
1091 selectors, and text-entry boxes for configuring the various
1094 Support for doing tab-completion of email addresses
1096 This support currently relies on an external program,
1097 (notmuch-addresses), that is not yet shipped with notmuch
1098 itself. But multiple, suitable implementations of this program have
1099 already been written that generate address completions by doing
1100 notmuch searches of your email collection. For example, providing
1101 first those addresses that you have composed messages to in the
1104 One such program (implemented in python with the python bindings to
1105 notmuch) is available via:
1107 git clone http://jkr.acm.jhu.edu/git/notmuch_addresses.git
1109 Install that program as notmuch-addresses on your PATH, and then
1110 hitting TAB on a partial email address or name within the To: or Cc:
1111 line of an email message will provide matching completions.
1113 Support for file-based (Fcc) delivery of sent messages to mail store
1115 This isn't yet enabled by default. To enable this, one will have to
1116 set the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" setting within the notmuch customize
1117 screen, (see its documentation there for details). We anticipate
1118 making this automatic in a future release.
1120 New 'G' key binding to trigger mail refresh (G == "Get new mail")
1122 The 'G' key works wherever '=' works. Before refreshing the screen
1123 it calls an external program that can be used to poll email servers,
1124 run notmuch new and setup specific tags for the new emails. The
1125 script to be called should be configured with the "Notmuch Poll
1126 Script" setting in the customize interface. This script will
1127 typically invoke "notmuch new" and then perhaps several "notmuch
1130 Implement emacs message display with the JSON output from notmuch.
1132 This is much more robust than the previous implementation, (where
1133 some HTML mails and mail quoting the notmuch code with the delimiter
1134 characters in it would cause the parser to fall over).
1136 Better handling of HTML messages and MIME attachments (inline images!)
1138 Allow for any MIME parts that emacs can display to be displayed
1139 inline. This includes inline viewing of image attachments, (provided
1140 the window is large enough to fit the image at its natural size).
1142 Much more robust handling of HTML messages. Currently both text/plain
1143 and text/html alternates will be rendered next to each other. In a
1144 future release, users will be able to decide to see only one or the
1145 other representation.
1147 Each attachment now has its own button so that attachments can be
1148 saved individually (the 'w' key is still available to save all
1151 Customizable support for tidying of text/plain message content
1153 Many new functions are available for tidying up message
1154 content. These include options such as wrapping long lines,
1155 compressing duplicate blank lines, etc.
1157 Most of these are disabled by default, but can easily be enabled by
1158 clicking the available check boxes under the "Notmuch Show Insert
1159 Text/Plain Hook" within the notmuch customize screen.
1161 New support for searchable citations (even when hidden)
1163 When portions of overly-long citations are hidden, the contents of
1164 these citations will still be available for emacs' standard
1165 "incremental search" functions. When the search matches any portion
1166 of a hidden citation, the citation will become visible temporarily
1167 to display the search result.
1169 More flexible handling of header visibility
1171 As an answer to complaints from many users, the To, Cc, and Date
1172 headers of messages are no longer hidden by default. For those users
1173 that liked that these were hidden, a new "Notmuch Messages Headers
1174 Visible" option in the customize interface can be set to nil. The
1175 visibility of headers can still be toggled on a per-message basis
1176 with the 'h' keybinding.
1178 For users that don't want to see some subset of those headers, the
1179 new "Notmuch Message Headers" variable can be customized to list
1180 only those headers that should be present in the display of a message.
1182 The Return key now toggles message visibility anywhere
1184 Previously this worked only on the first summary-line of a message.
1186 Customizable formatting of search results
1188 The user can easily customize the order, width, and formatting of
1189 the various fields in a "notmuch search" buffer. See the "Notmuch
1190 Search Result Format" section of the customize interface.
1192 Generate nicer names for search buffers when using a saved search.
1194 Add a notmuch User-Agent header when sending mail from notmuch/emacs.
1196 New keybinding (M-Ret) to open all collapsed messages in a thread.
1200 Provide a new NOTMUCH_SORT_UNSORTED value for queries
1202 This can be somewhat faster when sorting simply isn't desired. For
1203 example when collecting a set of messages that will all be
1204 manipulated identically, (adding a tag, removing a tag, deleting the
1205 messages), then there's no advantage to sorting the messages by
1210 Fix to compile against GMime 2.6
1212 Previously notmuch insisted on being able to find GMime 2.4, (even
1213 though GMime 2.6 would have worked all along).
1215 Fix configure script to accept (and ignore) various standard options.
1217 For example, those that the Gentoo build scripts expect configure to
1218 accept are now all accepted.
1222 A large number of new tests for the many new features.
1224 Better display of output from failed tests.
1226 Now shows failures with diff rather than forcing the user to gaze at
1227 complete actual and expected output looking for deviation.
1229 Notmuch 0.2 (2010-04-16)
1230 ========================
1231 This is the second release of the notmuch mail system, with actual
1232 detailed release notes this time!
1234 This release consists of a number of minor new features that make
1235 notmuch more pleasant to use, and a few fairly major bug fixes.
1237 We didn't quite hit our release target of "about a week" from the 0.1
1238 release, (0.2 is happening 11 days after 0.1), but we hope to do
1239 better for next week. Look forward to some major features coming to
1240 notmuch in subsequent releases.
1246 Better guessing of From: header.
1248 Notmuch now tries harder to guess which configured address should be
1249 used as the From: line in a "notmuch reply". It will examine the
1250 Received: headers if it fails to find any configured address in To:
1251 or Cc:. This allows it to often choose the correct address even when
1252 replying to a message sent to a mailing list, and not directly to a
1255 Make "notmuch count" with no arguments count all messages
1257 Previously, it was hard to construct a search term that was
1258 guaranteed to match all messages.
1260 Provide a new special-case search term of "*" to match all messages.
1262 This can be used in any command accepting a search term, such as
1263 "notmuch search '*'". Note that you'll want to take care that the
1264 shell doesn't expand * against the current files. And note that the
1265 support for "*" is a special case. It's only meaningful as a single
1266 search term and loses its special meaning when combined with any
1269 Automatically detect thread connections even when a parent message is
1272 Previously, if two or more message were received with a common
1273 parent, but that parent was not received, then these messages would
1274 not be recognized as belonging to the same thread. This is now fixed
1275 so that such messages are properly connected in a thread.
1279 Fix potential data loss in "notmuch new" with SIGINT
1281 One code path in "notmuch new" was not properly handling
1282 SIGINT. Previously, this could lead to messages being removed from
1283 the database (and their tags being lost) if the user pressed
1284 Control-C while "notmuch new" was working.
1286 Fix segfault when a message includes a MIME part that is empty.
1288 Fix handling of non-ASCII characters with --format=json
1290 Previously, characters outside the range of 7-bit ASCII were
1291 silently dropped from the JSON output. This led to corrupted display
1292 of utf-8 content in the upcoming notmuch web-based frontends.
1294 Fix headers to be properly decoded in "notmuch reply"
1296 Previously, the user might see:
1298 Subject: Re: =?iso-8859-2?q?Rozlu=E8ka?=
1302 Subject: Re: Rozlučka
1304 The former text is properly encoded to be RFC-compliant SMTP, will
1305 be sent correctly, and will be properly decoded by the
1306 recipient. But the user trying to edit the reply would likely be
1307 unable to read or edit that field in its encoded form.
1309 Emacs client features
1310 ---------------------
1311 Show the last few lines of citations as well as the first few lines.
1313 It's often the case that the last sentence of a citation is what is
1314 being replied to directly, so the last few lines are often much more
1315 important. The number of lines shown at the beginning and end of any
1316 citation can be configured, (notmuch-show-citation-lines-prefix and
1317 notmuch-show-citation-lines-suffix).
1319 The '+' and '-' commands in the search view can now add and remove
1322 Selective bulk tagging is now possible by selecting a region of
1323 threads and then using either the '+' or '-' keybindings. Bulk
1324 tagging is still available for all threads matching the current
1325 search with the '*' binding.
1327 More meaningful buffer names for thread-view buffers.
1329 Notmuch now uses the Subject of the thread as the buffer
1330 name. Previously it was using the thread ID, which is a meaningless
1333 Provide for customized colors of threads in search view based on tags.
1335 See the documentation of notmuch-search-line-faces, (or us "M-x
1336 customize" and browse to the "notmuch" group within "Applications"
1337 and "Mail"), for details on how to configure this colorization.
1339 Build-system features
1340 ---------------------
1341 Add support to properly build libnotmuch on Darwin systems (OS X).
1343 Add support to configure for many standard options.
1345 We include actual support for:
1347 --includedir --mandir --sysconfdir
1349 And accept and silently ignore several more:
1351 --build --infodir --libexecdir --localstatedir
1352 --disable-maintainer-mode --disable-dependency-tracking
1354 Install emacs client in "make install" rather than requiring a
1355 separate "make install-emacs".
1357 Automatically compute versions numbers between releases.
1359 This support uses the git-describe notation, so a version such as
1360 0.1-144-g43cbbfc indicates a version that is 144 commits since the
1361 0.1 release and is available as git commit "43cbbfc".
1363 Add a new "make test" target to run the test suite and actually verify
1366 Notmuch 0.1 (2010-04-05)
1367 ========================
1368 This is the first release of the notmuch mail system.
1370 It includes the libnotmuch library, the notmuch command-line
1371 interface, and an emacs-based interface to notmuch.
1373 Note: Notmuch will work best with Xapian 1.0.18 (or later) or Xapian
1374 1.1.4 (or later). Previous versions of Xapian (whether 1.0 or 1.1) had
1375 a performance bug that made notmuch very slow when modifying
1376 tags. This would cause distracting pauses when reading mail while
1377 notmuch would wait for Xapian when removing the "inbox" and "unread"
1378 tags from messages in a thread.