1 Notmuch 0.10 (2011-xx-xx)
2 =========================
4 New build and testing features
5 ------------------------------
7 Emacs tests are now done in dtach. This means that dtach is now
8 needed to run the notmuch test suite, at least until the checking for
9 prerequisites is improved.
11 Full test coverage of the stashing feature in Emacs.
13 New command-line features
14 -------------------------
16 Add "notmuch restore --accumulate" option
18 The --accumulate switch causes the union of the existing and new tags to be
19 applied, instead of replacing each message's tags as they are read in from
22 Add search terms to "notmuch dump"
24 The dump command now takes an optional search term much like notmuch
25 search/show/tag. The output file argument of dump is deprecated in
26 favour of using stdout.
28 Add "notmuch search" --offset and --limit options
30 The search command now takes options --offset=[-]N and --limit=N to limit
31 the number of results shown.
33 Add "notmuch count --output" option
35 The count command is now capable of counting threads in addition to
36 messages. This is selected using the new --output=(threads|messages) option.
41 Add tab-completion for notmuch-search and notmuch-search-filter
43 These functions now support completion tags for query parts
46 Turn "id:MSG-ID" links into buttons associated with notmuch searches
48 Text of the form "id:MSG-ID" in mails is now a clickable button that
49 opens a notmuch search for the given message id.
51 Add keybinding ('c I') for stashing Message-ID's without an id: prefix
53 Reduces manual labour when stashing them for use outside notmuch.
58 Emacs now constructs large search buffers more efficiently
60 Search avoids opening and parsing message files
62 We now store more information in the database so search no longer
63 has to open every message file to get basic headers. This can
64 improve search speed by as much as 10X, but taking advantage of this
65 requires a database rebuild:
67 notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
68 # Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
70 notmuch restore notmuch.dump
72 New collection of add-on tools
73 ------------------------------
75 The source directory "contrib" contains tools built on notmuch. These
76 tools are not part of notmuch, and you should check their individual
77 licenses. Feel free to report problems with them to the notmuch
80 nmbug - share tags with a given prefix
82 nmbug helps maintain a git repo containing all tags with a given
83 prefix (by default "notmuch::"). Tags can be shared by commiting
84 them to git in one location and restoring in another.
86 Notmuch 0.9 (2011-10-01)
87 ========================
92 Correct handling of interruptions during "notmuch new"
94 "notmuch new" now operates as a series of small, self-consistent
95 transactions, so it can correctly resume after an interruption or
96 crash. Previously, interruption could lose existing tags, fail to
97 detect messages on resume, or leave the database in a state
98 temporarily or permanently inconsistent with the mail store.
105 notmuch_database_begin_atomic and notmuch_database_end_atomic allow
106 multiple database operations to be performed atomically.
108 notmuch_database_find_message_by_filename does exactly what it says.
112 notmuch_database_find_message (and n_d_f_m_by_filename) now return
113 a status indicator and uses an output parameter for the
114 message. This change required changing the SONAME of libnotmuch to
117 Python bindings changes
118 -----------------------
120 - Re-encode python unicode objects to utf-8 before passing back to
122 - Support Database().begin_atomic()/end_atomic()
123 - Support Database().find_message_by_filename()
124 NB! This needs a db opened in READ-WRITE mode currently, or it will crash
125 the python process. The is a limitation (=bug) of the underlying libnotmuch.
126 - Fixes where we would not throw NotmuchErrors when we should (Justus Winter)
127 - Update for n_d_find_message* API changes (see above).
129 Ruby bindings changes
130 ---------------------
132 - Wrap new library functions notmuch_database_{begin,end}_atomic.
133 - Add new exception Notmuch::UnbalancedAtomicError.
134 - Rename destroy to destroy! according to Ruby naming conventions.
135 - Update for n_d_find_message* API changes (see above).
140 * Add gpg callback to crypto sigstatus buttons to retrieve/refresh
142 * Add notmuch-show-refresh-view function (and corresponding binding)
143 to refresh the view of a notmuch-show buffer.
145 Reply formatting cleanup
146 ------------------------
148 "notmuch reply" no longer includes notification that non-leafnode
149 MIME parts are being suppressed.
151 Notmuch 0.8 (2011-09-10)
152 ========================
154 Improved handling of message/rfc822 parts
156 Both in the CLI and the emacs interface. Output of rfc822 parts now
157 includes the primary headers, as well as the body and all subparts.
158 Output of the completely raw rfc822-formatted message, including all
159 headers, is unfortunately not yet supported (but hopefully will be
162 Improved Build system portability
164 Certain parts of the shell script generating notmuch.sym were
165 specific to the GNU versions of sed and nm. The new version should
166 be more portable to e.g. OpenBSD.
168 Documentation update for Ruby bindings
170 Added documentation, typo fixes, and improved support for rdoc.
172 Unicode, iterator, PEP8 changes for python bindings
174 - PEP8 (code formatting) changes for python files.
175 - Remove Tags.__len__ ; see 0.6 release notes for motivation.
176 - Decode headers as UTF8, encode (unicode) database paths as UTF8.
178 Notmuch 0.7 (2011-08-01)
179 ========================
181 Vim interface improvements
182 --------------------------
184 Jason Woofenden provided a number of bug fixes for the Vim interface
186 * fix citation/signature fold lengths
187 * fix cig/cit parsing within multipart/*
188 * fix on-screen instructions for show-signature
189 * fix from list reformatting in search view
190 * fix space key: now archives (did opposite)
192 Uwe Kleine-König contributed
194 * use full path for sendmail/doc fix
195 * fix compose temp file name
197 Python Bindings changes
198 -----------------------
200 Sebastian Spaeth contributed two changes related to unicode and UTF8:
202 * message tags are now explicitly unicode
203 * query string is encoded as a UTF8 byte string
205 Build-System improvements
206 ------------------------
208 Generate notmuch.sym after the relevant object files
210 This fixes a bug in parallel building. Thanks to Thomas Jost for the
213 Notmuch 0.6.1 (2011-07-17)
214 ==========================
219 Re-export Xapian exception typeinfo symbols.
221 It turned out our aggressive symbol hiding caused problems for
222 people running gcc 4.4.5.
224 Notmuch 0.6 (2011-07-01)
225 =======================
226 New, general features
227 ---------------------
228 Folder-based searching
230 Notmuch queries can now include a search term to match the
231 directories in which mail files are stored (within the mail
232 storage). The syntax is as follows:
236 For example, one might use things such as:
242 to match any path containing a directory "spam", "work/todo", or
243 containing a directory starting with "2011-", respectively.
245 This feature is particularly useful for users of delivery-agent
246 software (such as procmail or maildrop) that is filtering mail and
247 delivering it to particular folders, or users of systems such as
248 Gmail that use filesystem directories to indicate message tags.
250 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
251 notmuch will be searchable with folder: terms. In order to enable
252 this feature for all mail, the entire notmuch index will need to be
255 notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
256 # Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
258 notmuch restore notmuch.dump
262 Both the command line interface and the emacs-interface have new
263 support for PGP/MIME, detailed below. Thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor
264 and Jameson Graef Rollins for making this happen.
266 New, automatic tags: "signed" and "encrypted"
268 These tags will automatically be applied to messages containing
269 multipart/signed and multipart/encrypted parts.
271 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
272 notmuch will receive these tags.
274 New command-line features
275 -------------------------
276 Add new "notmuch show --verify" option for signature verification
278 This option instruct notmuch to verify the signature of
279 PGP/MIME-signed parts.
281 Add new "notmuch show --decrypt" and "notmuch reply --decrypt" options
283 This option instructs notmuch to decrypt PGP/MIME-encrypted parts.
284 Note that this feature currently requires gpg-agent and a passphrase entry
285 tool (e.g. pinentry-gtk or pinentry-curses).
287 Proper nesting of multipart parts in "notmuch show" output
289 MIME parts are now display with proper nesting to reflect original
290 MIME hierarchy of a message. This allows clients to correctly
291 analyze the MIME structure, (such as, for example, determining to
292 which parts a signature part applies).
294 Add new "notmuch show --part" option
296 This is a replacement for the older "notmuch part" command, (which
297 is now deprecated—it should still work as always, but is no longer
298 documented). Putting part output under "notmuch show" allows for all
299 of the "notmuch show" options to be applied when extracting a single
300 part, (such as --format=json for extracting a message part with JSON
303 Deprecate "notmuch search-tags", (in favor of "notmuch search --output=tags *")
305 The "notmuch search-tags" sub-command has been redundant since the
306 addition of the --output=tags option to "notmuch search". We now
307 make that more clear by deprecating "notmuch search-tags", (dropping
308 it from the documentation). We do continue to support the old syntax
309 by translating it internally to the new call.
311 Performance improvements
312 ------------------------
313 Faster searches (by doing fewer searches to construct threads)
315 Whenever a user asks for search results as threads, notmuch first
316 performs a search for messages matching the query, then performs
317 additional searches to find other messages in the resulting threads.
319 Removing inefficiencies and redundancies in these secondary searches
320 results in a measured speedups of 1.5x for a typical search.
322 Faster searches (by doing fewer passes to gather message data)
324 Optimizing Xapian data access patterns (using a single pass to get
325 all message-document data rather than a pass for each data type)
326 results in a measured speedup of 1.7x for a typical search.
328 The benefits of this optimization combine with the preceding
329 optimization. With both in place, Austin Clements measured a speedup
330 of 2.5x for a search of all messages in his inbox (was 4.5s, now
331 1.8s). Thanks, Austin!
333 Faster initial indexing
335 More efficient indexing of new messages results in a measured
336 speedup of 1.4x for the initial indexing of 3 GB of mail (1h 14m
337 rather than 1h 46m). Thanks to Austin Clements and Michal Sojka.
339 Make "notmuch new" faster for unchanged directories
341 Optimizing to not do any further examinations of sub-directories
342 when the filesystem indicates that a directory is unchanged from the
343 last "notmuch new" results in measured speedups of 8.5 for the "No
344 new mail" case, (was 0.77s, now 0.09s). Thanks to Karel Zak.
346 New emacs-interface features
347 ----------------------------
349 Support for PGP/MIME (GnuPG)
351 Automatically indicate validity of signatures for multipart/signed
352 messages. Automatically display decrypted content for
353 multipart/encrypted messages. See the emacs variable
354 notmuch-crypto-process-mime for more information. Note that this
355 needs gpg-agent and a pinentry tool just as the command line tools.
356 Also note there is no support SMIME yet.
358 Output of pipe command is now displayed if pipe command fails
360 This is extremely useful in the common use case of piping a patch to
361 "git am". If git fails to cleanly merge the patch the error messages
362 from the failed merge are now clearly displayed to the user, (where
363 previously they were silently hidden from the user).
365 User-selectable From address
367 A user can choose which configured email addresses should be used as
368 the From address whenever composing a new message. To do so, simply
369 press C-u before the command which will open a new message. Emacs
370 will prompt for the from address to use.
372 The user can customize the "Notmuch Identities" setting in the
373 notmuch customize group in order to use addresses other than those in
374 the notmuch configuration file if desired.
376 The user can also choose to always be prompted for the from address
377 when composing a new message (without having to use C-u) by setting
378 the "Notmuch Always Prompt For Sender" option in the notmuch
381 Hiding of repeated subjects in collapsed thread view
383 In notmuch-show mode, if a collapsed message has the same subject as
384 its parent, the subject is not shown.
386 Automatic detection and hiding of original message in top-posted message
388 When a message contains a line looking something like:
390 ----- Original Message -----
392 emacs hides this and all subsequent lines as an "original message",
393 (allowing the user to click or press enter on the "original message"
394 button to display it again). This makes the handling of top-posted
395 citations work much like conventional citations.
397 New hooks for running code when tags are modified
399 Some users want to perform additional actions whenever a particular
400 tag is added/removed from a message. This could be used to, for
401 example, interface with some external spam-recognition training
402 tool. To facilitate this, two new hooks are added which can be
403 modified in the following settings of the notmuch customize group:
405 Notmuch Before Tag Hook
406 Notmuch After Tag Hook
408 New optional support for hiding some multipart/alternative parts
410 Many emails are sent with redundant content within a
411 multipart/alternative group (such as a text/plain part as well as a
412 text/html part). Users can configure the setting:
414 Notmuch Show All Multipart/Alternative Parts
416 to "off" in the notmuch customize group to have the interface
417 automatically hide some part alternatives (such as text/html
418 parts). This new part hiding is not configured by default yet
419 because there's not yet a simple way to re-display such a hidden
420 part if it is not actually redundant with a displayed part.
422 Better rendering of text/x-vcalendar parts
424 These parts are now displayed in a format suitable for use with the
427 Avoid getting confused by Subject and Author fields with newline characters
429 Replacing all characters with ASCII code less than 32 with a question mark.
431 Cleaner display of From line in email messages (remove double quotes,
432 and drop "name" if it's actually just a repeat of the email address).
434 Vim interface improvements
435 --------------------------
436 Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface:
438 * Using sendmail directly rather than mailx,
439 * Implementing archive in show view
440 * Add support to mark as read in show and search views
441 * Add delete commands
444 Bindings improvements
445 ---------------------
446 Ruby bindings are now much more complete
448 Including QUERY.sort, QUERY.to_s, MESSAGE.maildir_flags_to_tags,
449 MESSAGE.tags_to_maildir_flags, and MESSAGE.get_filenames
451 * Python bindings have been updated and extended
452 (docs online at http://packages.python.org/notmuch/)
455 - Message().get_filenames(),
456 - Message().tags_to_maildir_flags(),Message().maildir_flags_to_tags()
457 - list(Threads()) and list(Messages) works now
459 - Message().__cmp__() and __hash__()
460 These allow, for example:
463 As well as set arithmetic on Messages():
465 s1, s2= set(msgs1), set(msgs2)
470 - len(Messages()) as it exhausted the iterator.
471 Use len(list(Messages())) or
472 Query.count_messages() to get the length.
474 Added initial Go bindings in bindings/go
476 New build-system features
477 -------------------------
478 Added support for building in a directory other than the source directory
480 This can be used with the widely-supported idiom of simply running
481 the configure script from some other directory:
488 Fix to save configure options for future, implicit runs of configure
490 When a user updates the source (such as with "git pull") calling
491 "make" may cause an automatic re-run of the configure script. When
492 this happens, the configure script will automatically be called with
493 the same options the user originally passed in the most-recent
494 manual invocation of configure.
496 New test-suite feature
497 ----------------------
498 Binary for bash for running test suite now located via PATH.
500 The notmuch test suite requires a fairly recent version of bash (>=
501 bash 4). As some systems supply an older version of bash at
502 /bin/bash, the test suite is now updated to search $PATH to locate
503 the bash binary. This allows users of systems with old /bin/bash to
504 simply install bash >= 4 somewhere on $PATH before /bin and then use
507 Support for testing output with a trailing newline.
509 Previously, some tests would fail to notice a difference in the
510 presence/absence of a trailing newline in a program output, (which
511 has led to bugs in the past). Now, carefully-written tests (using
512 test_expect_equal_file rather than test_expect_equal) will detect
513 any change in the presence/absence of a trailing newline. Many tests
514 are updated to take advantage of this.
516 Avoiding accessing user's $HOME while running test suite
518 The test suite now carefully creates its own HOME directory. This
519 allows the test suite to be run with no existing HOME directory, (as
520 some build systems apparently do), and avoids test-suite differences
521 due to configuration files in the users HOME directory.
526 Output *all* files for "notmuch search --output=files"
528 For the cases where multiple files have the same Message ID,
529 previous versions of notmuch would output only one such file. This
530 command is now fixed to correctly output all files.
532 Fixed spurious search results from "overlapped" indexing of addresses
534 This fixed a bug where a search for:
536 to:user@elsewhere.com
538 would incorrectly match a message sent:
540 To: user@example,com, someone@elsewhere.com
542 Fix --output=json when search has no results
544 A bug present since notmuch 0.4 had caused searches with no results
545 to produce an invalid json object. This is now fixed to cleanly
546 return a valid json object representing an empty array "[]" as
549 fix the automatic detection of the From address for "notmuch reply"
550 from the Received headers in some cases.
552 Fix core dump on DragonFlyBSD due to -1 return value from
553 sysconf(_SC_GETPW_R_SIZE_MAX).
555 Cleaned up several memory leaks
557 Eliminated a few, rare segmentation faults and a double-free.
559 Fix libnotmuch library to only export notmuch API functions
561 Previous release of the notmuch library also exported some Xapian
562 C++ exception type symbols. These were never part of the library
563 interface and were never intended to be exported.
565 Emacs-interface bug fixes
566 -------------------------
567 Display any unexpected output or errors from "notmuch search" invocations
569 Previously any misformatted output or trailing error messages were
570 silently ignored. This output is now clearly displayed. This fix was
571 very helpful in identifying and fixing the bug described below.
573 Fix bug where some threads would be missing from large search results
575 When a search returned a "large" number of results, the emacs
576 interface was incorrectly dropping one thread every time the output
577 of the "notmuch search" process spanned the emacs read-buffer. This
580 Avoid re-compression of .gz files (and similar) when saving attachment
582 Emacs was being too clever for its own good and trying to
583 re-compress pre-compressed .gz files when saving such attachments
584 (potentially corrupting the attachment). The emacs interface is
585 fixed to avoid this bug.
587 Fix hiding of a message when a previously-hidden citation is visible
589 Previously the citation would remain visible in this case. This is
590 fixed so that hiding a message hides all parts.
592 Notmuch 0.5 (2010-11-11)
593 ========================
594 New, general features
595 ---------------------
596 Maildir-flag synchronization
598 Notmuch now knows how to synchronize flags in maildir filenames with
599 tags in the notmuch database. The following flag/tag mappings are
608 'S' unread (added when 'S' flag is not present)
610 The synchronization occurs in both directions, (for example, adding
611 the 'S' flag to a file will cause the "unread" tag to be added, and
612 adding the "replied" tag to a message will cause the file to be
613 renamed with an 'R' flag).
615 This synchronization is enabled by default for users of the
616 command-line interface, (though only files in directories named
617 "cur" or "new" will be renamed). It can be disabled by setting the
618 new maildir.synchronize_flags option in the configuration file. For
621 notmuch config set maildir.synchronize_flags false
623 Users upgrading may also want to run "notmuch setup" once (just
624 accept the existing configuration) to get a new, nicely-commented
625 [maildir] section added to the configuration file.
627 For users of the notmuch library, the new synchronization
628 functionality is available with the following two new functions:
630 notmuch_message_maildir_flags_to_tags
631 notmuch_message_tags_to_maildir_flags
633 It is anticipated that future improvements to this support will
634 allow for safe synchronization of the 'T' flag with the "deleted"
635 tag, as well as support for custom flag/tag mappings.
639 Support for querying multiple filenames for a single message
641 It is common for the mailstore to contain multiple files with the
642 same message ID. Previously, notmuch would always hide these
643 duplicate files, (returning a single, arbitrary filename with
644 notmuch_message_get_filename).
646 With this release, library users can access all filenames for a
647 message with the new function:
649 notmuch_message_get_filenames
651 Together with notmuch_filenames_valid, notmuch_filenames_get, and
652 notmuch_filenames_move_to_next it is now possible to iterate over
653 all available filenames for a given message.
655 New command-line features
656 -------------------------
657 New "notmuch show --format=raw" for getting at original email contents
659 This new feature allows for a fully-functional email client to be
660 built on top of the notmuch command-line without needing any direct
661 access to the mail store itself.
663 For example, it's now possible to run "emacs -f notmuch" on a local
664 machine with only ssh access to the mail store/notmuch database. To
665 do this, simply set the notmuch-command variable in emacs to the
666 name of a script containing:
668 ssh user@host notmuch "$@"
670 If the ssh client has enabled connection sharing (ControlMaster
671 option in OpenSSH), the emacs interface can be quite responsive this
676 Fix "notmuch search" to print nothing when nothing matches
678 The 0.4 release had a bug in which:
680 notmuch search <expression-with-no-matches>
682 would produce a single blank line of output, (where previous
683 versions would produce no output. This fix also causes a change in
684 the --format=json output, (which would previously produce "[]" and
685 now produces nothing).
687 Emacs interface improvements
688 ----------------------------
689 Fix to allow pipe ('|') command to work when using notmuch over ssh
691 Fix count of lines in hidden signatures.
693 Omit repeated subject lines in (collapsed) thread display.
695 Display current thread subject in a header line.
697 Provide a "c i" binding to copy a thread ID from the search view.
699 Allow for notmuch-fcc-dirs to have a value of nil.
701 Also, the more complex form of notmuch-fcc-dirs now has a slightly
702 different format. It no longer has a special first-element, fallback
703 string. Instead it's now a list of cons cells where the car of each
704 cell is a regular expression to be matched against the sender
705 address, and the cdr is the name of a folder to use for an FCC. So
706 the old fallback behavior can be achieved by including a final cell
707 of (".*" . "default-fcc-folder").
709 Vim interface improvements
710 --------------------------
711 Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface.
713 These include optimizations, support for newer versions of vim, fixed
714 support for sending mail on modern systems, new commands, and
719 Added initial ruby bindings in bindings/ruby
721 Notmuch 0.4 (2010-11-01)
722 ========================
723 New command-line features
724 -------------------------
725 notmuch search --output=(summary|threads|messages|tags|files)
727 This new option allows for particular items to be returned from
728 notmuch searches. The "summary" option is the default and behaves
729 just as "notmuch search" has historically behaved.
731 The new option values allow for thread IDs, message IDs, lists of
732 tags, and lists of filenames to be returned from searches. It is
733 expected that this new option will be very useful in shell
734 scripts. For example:
736 for file in $(notmuch search --output=files <search-terms>); do
737 <operations-on> "$file"
740 notmuch show --format=mbox <search-specification>
742 This new option allows for the messages matching a search
743 specification to be presented as an mbox. Specifically the "mboxrd"
744 format is used which allows for reversible quoting of lines
745 beginning with "From ". A reader should remove a single '>' from the
746 beginning of all lines beginning with one or more '>' characters
747 followed by the 5 characters "From ".
749 notmuch config [get|set] <section>.<item> [value ...]
751 The new top-level "config" command allows for any value in the
752 notmuch configuration file to be queried or set to a new value. Both
753 single-valued and multi-valued items are supported, as our any
754 custom items stored in the configuration file.
756 Avoid setting Bcc header in "notmuch reply"
758 We decided that this was a bit heavy-handed as the actual mail
759 user-agent should be responsible for setting any Bcc option. Also,
760 see below for the notmuch/emacs user-agent now setting an Fcc by
761 default rather than Bcc.
765 Add notmuch_query_get_query_string and notmuch_query_get_sort
767 These are simply functions for querying properties of a
768 notmuch_query_t object.
772 Enable Fcc of all sent messages by default (to "sent" directory)
774 All messages sent from the emacs interface will now be saved to the
775 notmuch mail store where they will be incorporated to the database
776 by the next "notmuch new". By default, messages are saved to the
777 "sent" directory at the top-level of the mail store. This directory
778 can be customized by means of the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" option in the
779 notmuch customize interface.
781 Ability to all open messages in a thread to a pipe
783 Historically, the '|' keybinding allows for piping a single message
784 to an external command. Now, by prefixing this key with a prefix
785 argument, (for example, by pressing "Control-U |"), all open
786 messages in the current thread will be sent to the external command.
788 Optional support for detecting inline patches
790 This hook is disabled by default but can be enabled with a checkbox
791 under "Notmuch Show Insert Text/Plain Hook" in the notmuch customize
792 interface. It allows for inline patches to be detected and treated
793 as if they were attachments, (with context-sensitive highlighting).
795 Automatically tag messages as "replied" when sending a reply
797 Messages replied to within the emacs interface will now be tagged as
798 "replied". This feature can easily be customized to add or remove
799 other tags as well. For example, a user might use a tag of
800 "needs-reply" and can configure this feature to automatically remove
801 that tag when replying. See "Notmuch Message Mark Replied" in the
802 notmuch customize interface.
804 Allow search-result color specifications to overlay each other
806 For example, one tag can specify the background color of matching
807 lines, while another can specify the foreground. With this change,
808 both settings will now be visible simultaneously, (which was not the
809 case in previous releases). See "Notmuch Search Line Faces" in the
810 notmuch customize interface.
812 Make hidden author names still available for incremental search.
814 When there is insufficient space to display all authors of a thread
815 in search results, the names of hidden authors are now still made
816 available to emacs' incremental search commands. As the user
817 searches, matching lines will temporarily expand to show the hidden
820 New binding of Control-TAB (works like TAB in reverse)
822 Many notmuch nodes already use TAB to navigate forward through
823 various items allowing actions, (message headers, email attachments,
824 etc.). The new Control-TAB binding operates similarly but in the
827 New build-system features
828 -------------------------
829 Various portability fixes have been applied
831 These include fixes for build failures on at least Solaris, FreeBSD,
832 and Fedora systems. We're hopeful that the notmuch code base is now
833 more portable than ever before.
835 Arrange for libnotmuch to be found automatically after make install
837 The notmuch build system is now careful to help the user avoid
838 errors of the form "libnotmuch.so could not be found" immediately
839 after installing. This support takes two forms:
841 1. If the library is installed to a system directory,
842 (configured in /etc/ld.so.conf), then "make install" will
843 automatically run ldconfig.
845 2. If the library is installed to a non-system directory, the
846 build system adds a DR_RUNPATH entry to the final binary
847 pointing to the directory to which the library is installed.
849 When this support works, the user should be able to run notmuch
850 immediately after "make install", without any errors trying to find
851 the notmuch library, and without having to manually set environment
852 variables such as LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
854 Check compiler/linker options before using them
856 The configure script now carefully checks that any desired
857 compilation options, (whether for enabling compiler warnings, or for
858 embedding rpath, etc.), are supported. Only supported options are
859 used in the resulting Makefile.
861 New test-suite features
862 -----------------------
863 New modularization of test suite.
865 Thanks to a gracious relicensing of the test-suite infrastructure
866 from the git project, notmuch now has a modular test suite. This
867 provides the ability to run individual sections of the test suite
868 rather than the whole things. It also provides better summary of
869 test results, with support for tests that are expected to fail
870 (BROKEN and FIXED) in addition to PASS and FAIL. Finally, it makes
871 it easy to run the test suite within valgrind (pass --valgrind to
872 notmuch-test or to any sub-script) which has been very useful.
874 New testing of emacs interface.
876 The test suite has been augmented to allow automated testing of the
877 emacs interfaces. So far, this includes basic searches, display of
878 threads, and tag manipulation. This also includes a test that a new
879 message can successfully be sent out through a (dummy) SMTP server
880 and that said message is successfully integrated into the notmuch
881 database via the FCC setting.
885 Fix potential corruption of database when "notmuch new " is interrupted.
887 Previously, an interruption of "notmuch new" would (rarely) result
888 in a corrupt database. The corruption would manifest itself by a
889 persistent error of the form:
891 document ID of 1234 has no thread ID
893 The message-adding code has been carefully audited and reworked to
894 avoid this sort of corruption regardless of when it is interrupted.
896 Fix failure with extremely long message ID headers.
898 Previously, a message with an extremely long message ID, (say, more
899 than 300 characters), would fail to be added to notmuch, (triggering
900 Xapian exceptions). This has now been fixed.
902 Fix for messages with "charset=unknown-8bit"
904 Previously, messages with this charset would cause notmuch to emit a
905 GMime warning, (which would then trip up emacs or other interfaces
906 parsing the notmuch results).
908 Fix notmuch_query_search_threads function to return NULL on any exception
910 Fix "notmuch search" to return non-zero if notmuch_query_search_threads fails
912 Previously, this command could confusingly report a Xapian
913 exception, yet still return an error code of 0. It now correctly
914 returns a failing error code of 1 in this case.
918 Fix to handle a message with a subject containing, for example "[1234]"
920 Previously, a message subject containing a sequence of digits within
921 square brackets would cause the emacs interface to mis-parse the
922 output of "notmuch search". This would result in the message being
923 mis-displayed and prevent the user from manipulating the message in
926 Fix to correctly handle message IDs containing ".."
928 The emacs interface now properly quotes message IDs to avoid a
929 Xapian bug in which the ".." within a message ID would be
930 misinterpreted as a numeric range specification.
934 The python bindings for notmuch have been updated to work with python3.
936 Debian-specific fixes
937 ---------------------
938 Fix emacs initialization so "M-x notmuch" works for users by default.
940 Now, a new Debian user can immediately run "emacs -f notmuch" after
941 "apt-get install notmuch". Previously, the user would have had to
942 edit the ~/.emacs file to add "(require 'notmuch)" before this would
945 Notmuch 0.3.1 (2010-04-27)
946 ==========================
949 Fix an infinite loop in "notmuch reply"
951 This bug could be triggered by replying to a message where the
952 user's primary email address did not appear in the To: header and
953 the user had not configured any secondary email addresses. The bug
954 was a simple re-use of the same iterator variable in nested loops.
956 Fix a potential SEGV in "notmuch search"
958 This bug could be triggered by an author name ending in a ','.
959 Admittedly - that's almost certainly a spam email, but we never
960 want notmuch to crash.
964 Fix calculations for line wrapping in the primary "notmuch" view.
966 Fix Fcc support to prompt to create a directory if the specified Fcc
967 directory does not exist.
971 Fix build on OpenSolaris (at least) due to missing 'extern "C"' block.
973 Without this, the C++ sources could not find strcasestr and the
974 final linking of notmuch would fail.
976 Notmuch 0.3 (2010-04-27)
977 ========================
978 New command-line features
979 -------------------------
980 User-configurable tags for new messages
982 A new "new.tags" option is available in the configuration file to
983 determine which tags are applied to new messages. Run "notmuch
984 setup" to generate new documentation within ~/.notmuch-config on how
985 to specify this value.
987 Threads search results named based on subjects that match search
989 This means that when new mails arrived to a thread you've previously
990 read, and the new mails have a new subject, you will see that
991 subject in the search results rather than the old subject.
993 Faster operation of "notmuch tag" (avoid unneeded sorting)
995 Since the user just wants to tag all matching messages, we can make
996 things perform a bit faster by avoiding the sort.
998 Even Better guessing of From: header for "notmuch reply"
1000 Notmuch now looks at a number of headers when trying to figure out
1001 the best From: header to use in a reply. This is helpful if you have
1002 several configured email addresses, and you also subscribe to various
1003 mailing lists with different addresses, (so that mails you are
1004 replying to won't always include your subscribed address in the To:
1007 Indication of author names that match a search
1009 When notmuch displays threads as the result of a search, it now
1010 lists the authors that match the search before listing the other
1011 authors in the thread. It inserts a pipe '|' symbol between the last
1012 matching and first non-matching author. This is especially useful in
1013 a search that includes tag:unread. Now the authors of the unread
1014 messages in the thread are listed first.
1016 New: Python bindings
1017 --------------------
1018 Sebastian Spaeth has contributed his python bindings for the notmuch
1019 library to the central repository. These bindings were previously
1020 known as "cnotmuch" within python but have now been renamed to be
1021 accessible with a simple, and more official-looking "import notmuch".
1023 The bindings have already proven very useful as people proficient in
1024 python have been able to easily develop programs to do notmuch-based
1025 searches for email-address completion, maildir-flag synchronization,
1028 These bindings are available within the bindings/python directory, but
1029 are not yet integrated into the top-level Makefiles, nor the top-level
1030 package-building scripts. Improvements are welcome.
1032 Emacs interface improvements
1033 ----------------------------
1034 An entirely new initial view for notmuch, (friendly yet powerful)
1036 Some of us call the new view "notmuch hello" but you can get at it
1037 by simply calling "emacs -f notmuch". The new view provides a search
1038 bar where new searches can be performed. It also displays a list of
1039 recent searches, along with a button to save any of these, giving it
1040 a new name as a "saved search". Many people find these "saved
1041 searches" one of the most convenient ways of organizing their mail,
1042 (providing all of the features of "folders" in other mail clients,
1043 but without any of the disadvantages).
1045 Finally, this view can also optionally display all of the tags that
1046 exist in the database, along with a count for each tag, and a custom
1047 search of messages with that tag that's simply a click (or keypress)
1050 Note: For users that liked the original mode of "emacs -f notmuch"
1051 immediately displaying a particular search result, we
1052 recommend instead running something like:
1054 emacs --eval '(notmuch search "tag:inbox" t)'
1056 The "t" means to sort the messages in an "oldest first" order,
1057 (as notmuch would do previously by default). You can also
1058 leave that off to have your search results in "newest first"
1061 Full-featured "customize" support for configuring notmuch
1063 Notmuch now plugs in well to the emacs "customize" mode to make it
1064 much simpler to find things about the notmuch interface that can be
1065 tweaked by the user.
1067 You can get to this mode by starting at the main "Customize" menu in
1068 emacs, then browsing through "Applications", "Mail", and
1069 "Notmuch". Or you can go straight to "M-x customize-group"
1072 Once you're at the customize screen, you'll see a list of documented
1073 options that can be manipulated along with checkboxes, drop-down
1074 selectors, and text-entry boxes for configuring the various
1077 Support for doing tab-completion of email addresses
1079 This support currently relies on an external program,
1080 (notmuch-addresses), that is not yet shipped with notmuch
1081 itself. But multiple, suitable implementations of this program have
1082 already been written that generate address completions by doing
1083 notmuch searches of your email collection. For example, providing
1084 first those addresses that you have composed messages to in the
1087 One such program (implemented in python with the python bindings to
1088 notmuch) is available via:
1090 git clone http://jkr.acm.jhu.edu/git/notmuch_addresses.git
1092 Install that program as notmuch-addresses on your PATH, and then
1093 hitting TAB on a partial email address or name within the To: or Cc:
1094 line of an email message will provide matching completions.
1096 Support for file-based (Fcc) delivery of sent messages to mail store
1098 This isn't yet enabled by default. To enable this, one will have to
1099 set the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" setting within the notmuch customize
1100 screen, (see its documentation there for details). We anticipate
1101 making this automatic in a future release.
1103 New 'G' key binding to trigger mail refresh (G == "Get new mail")
1105 The 'G' key works wherever '=' works. Before refreshing the screen
1106 it calls an external program that can be used to poll email servers,
1107 run notmuch new and setup specific tags for the new emails. The
1108 script to be called should be configured with the "Notmuch Poll
1109 Script" setting in the customize interface. This script will
1110 typically invoke "notmuch new" and then perhaps several "notmuch
1113 Implement emacs message display with the JSON output from notmuch.
1115 This is much more robust than the previous implementation, (where
1116 some HTML mails and mail quoting the notmuch code with the delimiter
1117 characters in it would cause the parser to fall over).
1119 Better handling of HTML messages and MIME attachments (inline images!)
1121 Allow for any MIME parts that emacs can display to be displayed
1122 inline. This includes inline viewing of image attachments, (provided
1123 the window is large enough to fit the image at its natural size).
1125 Much more robust handling of HTML messages. Currently both text/plain
1126 and text/html alternates will be rendered next to each other. In a
1127 future release, users will be able to decide to see only one or the
1128 other representation.
1130 Each attachment now has its own button so that attachments can be
1131 saved individually (the 'w' key is still available to save all
1134 Customizable support for tidying of text/plain message content
1136 Many new functions are available for tidying up message
1137 content. These include options such as wrapping long lines,
1138 compressing duplicate blank lines, etc.
1140 Most of these are disabled by default, but can easily be enabled by
1141 clicking the available check boxes under the "Notmuch Show Insert
1142 Text/Plain Hook" within the notmuch customize screen.
1144 New support for searchable citations (even when hidden)
1146 When portions of overly-long citations are hidden, the contents of
1147 these citations will still be available for emacs' standard
1148 "incremental search" functions. When the search matches any portion
1149 of a hidden citation, the citation will become visible temporarily
1150 to display the search result.
1152 More flexible handling of header visibility
1154 As an answer to complaints from many users, the To, Cc, and Date
1155 headers of messages are no longer hidden by default. For those users
1156 that liked that these were hidden, a new "Notmuch Messages Headers
1157 Visible" option in the customize interface can be set to nil. The
1158 visibility of headers can still be toggled on a per-message basis
1159 with the 'h' keybinding.
1161 For users that don't want to see some subset of those headers, the
1162 new "Notmuch Message Headers" variable can be customized to list
1163 only those headers that should be present in the display of a message.
1165 The Return key now toggles message visibility anywhere
1167 Previously this worked only on the first summary-line of a message.
1169 Customizable formatting of search results
1171 The user can easily customize the order, width, and formatting of
1172 the various fields in a "notmuch search" buffer. See the "Notmuch
1173 Search Result Format" section of the customize interface.
1175 Generate nicer names for search buffers when using a saved search.
1177 Add a notmuch User-Agent header when sending mail from notmuch/emacs.
1179 New keybinding (M-Ret) to open all collapsed messages in a thread.
1183 Provide a new NOTMUCH_SORT_UNSORTED value for queries
1185 This can be somewhat faster when sorting simply isn't desired. For
1186 example when collecting a set of messages that will all be
1187 manipulated identically, (adding a tag, removing a tag, deleting the
1188 messages), then there's no advantage to sorting the messages by
1193 Fix to compile against GMime 2.6
1195 Previously notmuch insisted on being able to find GMime 2.4, (even
1196 though GMime 2.6 would have worked all along).
1198 Fix configure script to accept (and ignore) various standard options.
1200 For example, those that the Gentoo build scripts expect configure to
1201 accept are now all accepted.
1205 A large number of new tests for the many new features.
1207 Better display of output from failed tests.
1209 Now shows failures with diff rather than forcing the user to gaze at
1210 complete actual and expected output looking for deviation.
1212 Notmuch 0.2 (2010-04-16)
1213 ========================
1214 This is the second release of the notmuch mail system, with actual
1215 detailed release notes this time!
1217 This release consists of a number of minor new features that make
1218 notmuch more pleasant to use, and a few fairly major bug fixes.
1220 We didn't quite hit our release target of "about a week" from the 0.1
1221 release, (0.2 is happening 11 days after 0.1), but we hope to do
1222 better for next week. Look forward to some major features coming to
1223 notmuch in subsequent releases.
1229 Better guessing of From: header.
1231 Notmuch now tries harder to guess which configured address should be
1232 used as the From: line in a "notmuch reply". It will examine the
1233 Received: headers if it fails to find any configured address in To:
1234 or Cc:. This allows it to often choose the correct address even when
1235 replying to a message sent to a mailing list, and not directly to a
1238 Make "notmuch count" with no arguments count all messages
1240 Previously, it was hard to construct a search term that was
1241 guaranteed to match all messages.
1243 Provide a new special-case search term of "*" to match all messages.
1245 This can be used in any command accepting a search term, such as
1246 "notmuch search '*'". Note that you'll want to take care that the
1247 shell doesn't expand * against the current files. And note that the
1248 support for "*" is a special case. It's only meaningful as a single
1249 search term and loses its special meaning when combined with any
1252 Automatically detect thread connections even when a parent message is
1255 Previously, if two or more message were received with a common
1256 parent, but that parent was not received, then these messages would
1257 not be recognized as belonging to the same thread. This is now fixed
1258 so that such messages are properly connected in a thread.
1262 Fix potential data loss in "notmuch new" with SIGINT
1264 One code path in "notmuch new" was not properly handling
1265 SIGINT. Previously, this could lead to messages being removed from
1266 the database (and their tags being lost) if the user pressed
1267 Control-C while "notmuch new" was working.
1269 Fix segfault when a message includes a MIME part that is empty.
1271 Fix handling of non-ASCII characters with --format=json
1273 Previously, characters outside the range of 7-bit ASCII were
1274 silently dropped from the JSON output. This led to corrupted display
1275 of utf-8 content in the upcoming notmuch web-based frontends.
1277 Fix headers to be properly decoded in "notmuch reply"
1279 Previously, the user might see:
1281 Subject: Re: =?iso-8859-2?q?Rozlu=E8ka?=
1285 Subject: Re: Rozlučka
1287 The former text is properly encoded to be RFC-compliant SMTP, will
1288 be sent correctly, and will be properly decoded by the
1289 recipient. But the user trying to edit the reply would likely be
1290 unable to read or edit that field in its encoded form.
1292 Emacs client features
1293 ---------------------
1294 Show the last few lines of citations as well as the first few lines.
1296 It's often the case that the last sentence of a citation is what is
1297 being replied to directly, so the last few lines are often much more
1298 important. The number of lines shown at the beginning and end of any
1299 citation can be configured, (notmuch-show-citation-lines-prefix and
1300 notmuch-show-citation-lines-suffix).
1302 The '+' and '-' commands in the search view can now add and remove
1305 Selective bulk tagging is now possible by selecting a region of
1306 threads and then using either the '+' or '-' keybindings. Bulk
1307 tagging is still available for all threads matching the current
1308 search with the '*' binding.
1310 More meaningful buffer names for thread-view buffers.
1312 Notmuch now uses the Subject of the thread as the buffer
1313 name. Previously it was using the thread ID, which is a meaningless
1316 Provide for customized colors of threads in search view based on tags.
1318 See the documentation of notmuch-search-line-faces, (or us "M-x
1319 customize" and browse to the "notmuch" group within "Applications"
1320 and "Mail"), for details on how to configure this colorization.
1322 Build-system features
1323 ---------------------
1324 Add support to properly build libnotmuch on Darwin systems (OS X).
1326 Add support to configure for many standard options.
1328 We include actual support for:
1330 --includedir --mandir --sysconfdir
1332 And accept and silently ignore several more:
1334 --build --infodir --libexecdir --localstatedir
1335 --disable-maintainer-mode --disable-dependency-tracking
1337 Install emacs client in "make install" rather than requiring a
1338 separate "make install-emacs".
1340 Automatically compute versions numbers between releases.
1342 This support uses the git-describe notation, so a version such as
1343 0.1-144-g43cbbfc indicates a version that is 144 commits since the
1344 0.1 release and is available as git commit "43cbbfc".
1346 Add a new "make test" target to run the test suite and actually verify
1349 Notmuch 0.1 (2010-04-05)
1350 ========================
1351 This is the first release of the notmuch mail system.
1353 It includes the libnotmuch library, the notmuch command-line
1354 interface, and an emacs-based interface to notmuch.
1356 Note: Notmuch will work best with Xapian 1.0.18 (or later) or Xapian
1357 1.1.4 (or later). Previous versions of Xapian (whether 1.0 or 1.1) had
1358 a performance bug that made notmuch very slow when modifying
1359 tags. This would cause distracting pauses when reading mail while
1360 notmuch would wait for Xapian when removing the "inbox" and "unread"
1361 tags from messages in a thread.