1 Notmuch 0.11 (201x-xx-xx)
2 =========================
7 Automatic tag query optimization
9 "notmuch tag" now automatically optimizes the user's query to
10 exclude messages whose tags won't change. In the past, we've
11 suggested that people do this by hand; this is no longer necessary.
14 Notmuch 0.10.2 (2011-12-04)
15 ===========================
20 Fix crash in python bindings.
22 The python bindings did not call g_type_init, which caused crashes
23 for some, but not all users.
25 Notmuch 0.10.1 (2011-11-25)
26 ===========================
33 Argument processing changes in 0.10 introduced a bug where "notmuch
34 --help" crashed while "notmuch help" worked fine. This is fixed in
37 Notmuch 0.10 (2011-11-23)
38 =========================
40 New build and testing features
41 ------------------------------
43 Emacs tests are now done in dtach. This means that dtach is now
44 needed to run the notmuch test suite, at least until the checking for
45 prerequisites is improved.
47 Full test coverage of the stashing feature in Emacs.
49 New command-line features
50 -------------------------
52 Add "notmuch restore --accumulate" option
54 The --accumulate switch causes the union of the existing and new tags to be
55 applied, instead of replacing each message's tags as they are read in from
58 Add search terms to "notmuch dump"
60 The dump command now takes an optional search term much like notmuch
61 search/show/tag. The output file argument of dump is deprecated in
62 favour of using stdout.
64 Add "notmuch search" --offset and --limit options
66 The search command now takes options --offset=[-]N and --limit=N to limit
67 the number of results shown.
69 Add "notmuch count --output" option
71 The count command is now capable of counting threads in addition to
72 messages. This is selected using the new --output=(threads|messages) option.
77 Add tab-completion for notmuch-search and notmuch-search-filter
79 These functions now support completion tags for query parts
82 Turn "id:MSG-ID" links into buttons associated with notmuch searches
84 Text of the form "id:MSG-ID" in mails is now a clickable button that
85 opens a notmuch search for the given message id.
87 Add keybinding ('c I') for stashing Message-ID's without an id: prefix
89 Reduces manual labour when stashing them for use outside notmuch.
91 Do not query on notmuch-search exit
93 It is harmless to kill the external notmuch process, so the user
94 is no longer interrogated when they interrupt a search.
99 Emacs now constructs large search buffers more efficiently
101 Search avoids opening and parsing message files
103 We now store more information in the database so search no longer
104 has to open every message file to get basic headers. This can
105 improve search speed by as much as 10X, but taking advantage of this
106 requires a database rebuild:
108 notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
109 # Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
111 notmuch restore notmuch.dump
113 New collection of add-on tools
114 ------------------------------
116 The source directory "contrib" contains tools built on notmuch. These
117 tools are not part of notmuch, and you should check their individual
118 licenses. Feel free to report problems with them to the notmuch
121 nmbug - share tags with a given prefix
123 nmbug helps maintain a git repo containing all tags with a given
124 prefix (by default "notmuch::"). Tags can be shared by commiting
125 them to git in one location and restoring in another.
127 Notmuch 0.9 (2011-10-01)
128 ========================
130 New, general features
131 ---------------------
133 Correct handling of interruptions during "notmuch new"
135 "notmuch new" now operates as a series of small, self-consistent
136 transactions, so it can correctly resume after an interruption or
137 crash. Previously, interruption could lose existing tags, fail to
138 detect messages on resume, or leave the database in a state
139 temporarily or permanently inconsistent with the mail store.
146 notmuch_database_begin_atomic and notmuch_database_end_atomic allow
147 multiple database operations to be performed atomically.
149 notmuch_database_find_message_by_filename does exactly what it says.
153 notmuch_database_find_message (and n_d_f_m_by_filename) now return
154 a status indicator and uses an output parameter for the
155 message. This change required changing the SONAME of libnotmuch to
158 Python bindings changes
159 -----------------------
161 - Re-encode python unicode objects to utf-8 before passing back to
163 - Support Database().begin_atomic()/end_atomic()
164 - Support Database().find_message_by_filename()
165 NB! This needs a db opened in READ-WRITE mode currently, or it will crash
166 the python process. The is a limitation (=bug) of the underlying libnotmuch.
167 - Fixes where we would not throw NotmuchErrors when we should (Justus Winter)
168 - Update for n_d_find_message* API changes (see above).
170 Ruby bindings changes
171 ---------------------
173 - Wrap new library functions notmuch_database_{begin,end}_atomic.
174 - Add new exception Notmuch::UnbalancedAtomicError.
175 - Rename destroy to destroy! according to Ruby naming conventions.
176 - Update for n_d_find_message* API changes (see above).
181 * Add gpg callback to crypto sigstatus buttons to retrieve/refresh
183 * Add notmuch-show-refresh-view function (and corresponding binding)
184 to refresh the view of a notmuch-show buffer.
186 Reply formatting cleanup
187 ------------------------
189 "notmuch reply" no longer includes notification that non-leafnode
190 MIME parts are being suppressed.
192 Notmuch 0.8 (2011-09-10)
193 ========================
195 Improved handling of message/rfc822 parts
197 Both in the CLI and the emacs interface. Output of rfc822 parts now
198 includes the primary headers, as well as the body and all subparts.
199 Output of the completely raw rfc822-formatted message, including all
200 headers, is unfortunately not yet supported (but hopefully will be
203 Improved Build system portability
205 Certain parts of the shell script generating notmuch.sym were
206 specific to the GNU versions of sed and nm. The new version should
207 be more portable to e.g. OpenBSD.
209 Documentation update for Ruby bindings
211 Added documentation, typo fixes, and improved support for rdoc.
213 Unicode, iterator, PEP8 changes for python bindings
215 - PEP8 (code formatting) changes for python files.
216 - Remove Tags.__len__ ; see 0.6 release notes for motivation.
217 - Decode headers as UTF8, encode (unicode) database paths as UTF8.
219 Notmuch 0.7 (2011-08-01)
220 ========================
222 Vim interface improvements
223 --------------------------
225 Jason Woofenden provided a number of bug fixes for the Vim interface
227 * fix citation/signature fold lengths
228 * fix cig/cit parsing within multipart/*
229 * fix on-screen instructions for show-signature
230 * fix from list reformatting in search view
231 * fix space key: now archives (did opposite)
233 Uwe Kleine-König contributed
235 * use full path for sendmail/doc fix
236 * fix compose temp file name
238 Python Bindings changes
239 -----------------------
241 Sebastian Spaeth contributed two changes related to unicode and UTF8:
243 * message tags are now explicitly unicode
244 * query string is encoded as a UTF8 byte string
246 Build-System improvements
247 ------------------------
249 Generate notmuch.sym after the relevant object files
251 This fixes a bug in parallel building. Thanks to Thomas Jost for the
254 Notmuch 0.6.1 (2011-07-17)
255 ==========================
260 Re-export Xapian exception typeinfo symbols.
262 It turned out our aggressive symbol hiding caused problems for
263 people running gcc 4.4.5.
265 Notmuch 0.6 (2011-07-01)
266 =======================
267 New, general features
268 ---------------------
269 Folder-based searching
271 Notmuch queries can now include a search term to match the
272 directories in which mail files are stored (within the mail
273 storage). The syntax is as follows:
277 For example, one might use things such as:
283 to match any path containing a directory "spam", "work/todo", or
284 containing a directory starting with "2011-", respectively.
286 This feature is particularly useful for users of delivery-agent
287 software (such as procmail or maildrop) that is filtering mail and
288 delivering it to particular folders, or users of systems such as
289 Gmail that use filesystem directories to indicate message tags.
291 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
292 notmuch will be searchable with folder: terms. In order to enable
293 this feature for all mail, the entire notmuch index will need to be
296 notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
297 # Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
299 notmuch restore notmuch.dump
303 Both the command line interface and the emacs-interface have new
304 support for PGP/MIME, detailed below. Thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor
305 and Jameson Graef Rollins for making this happen.
307 New, automatic tags: "signed" and "encrypted"
309 These tags will automatically be applied to messages containing
310 multipart/signed and multipart/encrypted parts.
312 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
313 notmuch will receive these tags.
315 New command-line features
316 -------------------------
317 Add new "notmuch show --verify" option for signature verification
319 This option instruct notmuch to verify the signature of
320 PGP/MIME-signed parts.
322 Add new "notmuch show --decrypt" and "notmuch reply --decrypt" options
324 This option instructs notmuch to decrypt PGP/MIME-encrypted parts.
325 Note that this feature currently requires gpg-agent and a passphrase entry
326 tool (e.g. pinentry-gtk or pinentry-curses).
328 Proper nesting of multipart parts in "notmuch show" output
330 MIME parts are now display with proper nesting to reflect original
331 MIME hierarchy of a message. This allows clients to correctly
332 analyze the MIME structure, (such as, for example, determining to
333 which parts a signature part applies).
335 Add new "notmuch show --part" option
337 This is a replacement for the older "notmuch part" command, (which
338 is now deprecated—it should still work as always, but is no longer
339 documented). Putting part output under "notmuch show" allows for all
340 of the "notmuch show" options to be applied when extracting a single
341 part, (such as --format=json for extracting a message part with JSON
344 Deprecate "notmuch search-tags", (in favor of "notmuch search --output=tags *")
346 The "notmuch search-tags" sub-command has been redundant since the
347 addition of the --output=tags option to "notmuch search". We now
348 make that more clear by deprecating "notmuch search-tags", (dropping
349 it from the documentation). We do continue to support the old syntax
350 by translating it internally to the new call.
352 Performance improvements
353 ------------------------
354 Faster searches (by doing fewer searches to construct threads)
356 Whenever a user asks for search results as threads, notmuch first
357 performs a search for messages matching the query, then performs
358 additional searches to find other messages in the resulting threads.
360 Removing inefficiencies and redundancies in these secondary searches
361 results in a measured speedups of 1.5x for a typical search.
363 Faster searches (by doing fewer passes to gather message data)
365 Optimizing Xapian data access patterns (using a single pass to get
366 all message-document data rather than a pass for each data type)
367 results in a measured speedup of 1.7x for a typical search.
369 The benefits of this optimization combine with the preceding
370 optimization. With both in place, Austin Clements measured a speedup
371 of 2.5x for a search of all messages in his inbox (was 4.5s, now
372 1.8s). Thanks, Austin!
374 Faster initial indexing
376 More efficient indexing of new messages results in a measured
377 speedup of 1.4x for the initial indexing of 3 GB of mail (1h 14m
378 rather than 1h 46m). Thanks to Austin Clements and Michal Sojka.
380 Make "notmuch new" faster for unchanged directories
382 Optimizing to not do any further examinations of sub-directories
383 when the filesystem indicates that a directory is unchanged from the
384 last "notmuch new" results in measured speedups of 8.5 for the "No
385 new mail" case, (was 0.77s, now 0.09s). Thanks to Karel Zak.
387 New emacs-interface features
388 ----------------------------
390 Support for PGP/MIME (GnuPG)
392 Automatically indicate validity of signatures for multipart/signed
393 messages. Automatically display decrypted content for
394 multipart/encrypted messages. See the emacs variable
395 notmuch-crypto-process-mime for more information. Note that this
396 needs gpg-agent and a pinentry tool just as the command line tools.
397 Also note there is no support SMIME yet.
399 Output of pipe command is now displayed if pipe command fails
401 This is extremely useful in the common use case of piping a patch to
402 "git am". If git fails to cleanly merge the patch the error messages
403 from the failed merge are now clearly displayed to the user, (where
404 previously they were silently hidden from the user).
406 User-selectable From address
408 A user can choose which configured email addresses should be used as
409 the From address whenever composing a new message. To do so, simply
410 press C-u before the command which will open a new message. Emacs
411 will prompt for the from address to use.
413 The user can customize the "Notmuch Identities" setting in the
414 notmuch customize group in order to use addresses other than those in
415 the notmuch configuration file if desired.
417 The user can also choose to always be prompted for the from address
418 when composing a new message (without having to use C-u) by setting
419 the "Notmuch Always Prompt For Sender" option in the notmuch
422 Hiding of repeated subjects in collapsed thread view
424 In notmuch-show mode, if a collapsed message has the same subject as
425 its parent, the subject is not shown.
427 Automatic detection and hiding of original message in top-posted message
429 When a message contains a line looking something like:
431 ----- Original Message -----
433 emacs hides this and all subsequent lines as an "original message",
434 (allowing the user to click or press enter on the "original message"
435 button to display it again). This makes the handling of top-posted
436 citations work much like conventional citations.
438 New hooks for running code when tags are modified
440 Some users want to perform additional actions whenever a particular
441 tag is added/removed from a message. This could be used to, for
442 example, interface with some external spam-recognition training
443 tool. To facilitate this, two new hooks are added which can be
444 modified in the following settings of the notmuch customize group:
446 Notmuch Before Tag Hook
447 Notmuch After Tag Hook
449 New optional support for hiding some multipart/alternative parts
451 Many emails are sent with redundant content within a
452 multipart/alternative group (such as a text/plain part as well as a
453 text/html part). Users can configure the setting:
455 Notmuch Show All Multipart/Alternative Parts
457 to "off" in the notmuch customize group to have the interface
458 automatically hide some part alternatives (such as text/html
459 parts). This new part hiding is not configured by default yet
460 because there's not yet a simple way to re-display such a hidden
461 part if it is not actually redundant with a displayed part.
463 Better rendering of text/x-vcalendar parts
465 These parts are now displayed in a format suitable for use with the
468 Avoid getting confused by Subject and Author fields with newline characters
470 Replacing all characters with ASCII code less than 32 with a question mark.
472 Cleaner display of From line in email messages (remove double quotes,
473 and drop "name" if it's actually just a repeat of the email address).
475 Vim interface improvements
476 --------------------------
477 Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface:
479 * Using sendmail directly rather than mailx,
480 * Implementing archive in show view
481 * Add support to mark as read in show and search views
482 * Add delete commands
485 Bindings improvements
486 ---------------------
487 Ruby bindings are now much more complete
489 Including QUERY.sort, QUERY.to_s, MESSAGE.maildir_flags_to_tags,
490 MESSAGE.tags_to_maildir_flags, and MESSAGE.get_filenames
492 * Python bindings have been updated and extended
493 (docs online at http://packages.python.org/notmuch/)
496 - Message().get_filenames(),
497 - Message().tags_to_maildir_flags(),Message().maildir_flags_to_tags()
498 - list(Threads()) and list(Messages) works now
500 - Message().__cmp__() and __hash__()
501 These allow, for example:
504 As well as set arithmetic on Messages():
506 s1, s2= set(msgs1), set(msgs2)
511 - len(Messages()) as it exhausted the iterator.
512 Use len(list(Messages())) or
513 Query.count_messages() to get the length.
515 Added initial Go bindings in bindings/go
517 New build-system features
518 -------------------------
519 Added support for building in a directory other than the source directory
521 This can be used with the widely-supported idiom of simply running
522 the configure script from some other directory:
529 Fix to save configure options for future, implicit runs of configure
531 When a user updates the source (such as with "git pull") calling
532 "make" may cause an automatic re-run of the configure script. When
533 this happens, the configure script will automatically be called with
534 the same options the user originally passed in the most-recent
535 manual invocation of configure.
537 New test-suite feature
538 ----------------------
539 Binary for bash for running test suite now located via PATH.
541 The notmuch test suite requires a fairly recent version of bash (>=
542 bash 4). As some systems supply an older version of bash at
543 /bin/bash, the test suite is now updated to search $PATH to locate
544 the bash binary. This allows users of systems with old /bin/bash to
545 simply install bash >= 4 somewhere on $PATH before /bin and then use
548 Support for testing output with a trailing newline.
550 Previously, some tests would fail to notice a difference in the
551 presence/absence of a trailing newline in a program output, (which
552 has led to bugs in the past). Now, carefully-written tests (using
553 test_expect_equal_file rather than test_expect_equal) will detect
554 any change in the presence/absence of a trailing newline. Many tests
555 are updated to take advantage of this.
557 Avoiding accessing user's $HOME while running test suite
559 The test suite now carefully creates its own HOME directory. This
560 allows the test suite to be run with no existing HOME directory, (as
561 some build systems apparently do), and avoids test-suite differences
562 due to configuration files in the users HOME directory.
567 Output *all* files for "notmuch search --output=files"
569 For the cases where multiple files have the same Message ID,
570 previous versions of notmuch would output only one such file. This
571 command is now fixed to correctly output all files.
573 Fixed spurious search results from "overlapped" indexing of addresses
575 This fixed a bug where a search for:
577 to:user@elsewhere.com
579 would incorrectly match a message sent:
581 To: user@example,com, someone@elsewhere.com
583 Fix --output=json when search has no results
585 A bug present since notmuch 0.4 had caused searches with no results
586 to produce an invalid json object. This is now fixed to cleanly
587 return a valid json object representing an empty array "[]" as
590 fix the automatic detection of the From address for "notmuch reply"
591 from the Received headers in some cases.
593 Fix core dump on DragonFlyBSD due to -1 return value from
594 sysconf(_SC_GETPW_R_SIZE_MAX).
596 Cleaned up several memory leaks
598 Eliminated a few, rare segmentation faults and a double-free.
600 Fix libnotmuch library to only export notmuch API functions
602 Previous release of the notmuch library also exported some Xapian
603 C++ exception type symbols. These were never part of the library
604 interface and were never intended to be exported.
606 Emacs-interface bug fixes
607 -------------------------
608 Display any unexpected output or errors from "notmuch search" invocations
610 Previously any misformatted output or trailing error messages were
611 silently ignored. This output is now clearly displayed. This fix was
612 very helpful in identifying and fixing the bug described below.
614 Fix bug where some threads would be missing from large search results
616 When a search returned a "large" number of results, the emacs
617 interface was incorrectly dropping one thread every time the output
618 of the "notmuch search" process spanned the emacs read-buffer. This
621 Avoid re-compression of .gz files (and similar) when saving attachment
623 Emacs was being too clever for its own good and trying to
624 re-compress pre-compressed .gz files when saving such attachments
625 (potentially corrupting the attachment). The emacs interface is
626 fixed to avoid this bug.
628 Fix hiding of a message when a previously-hidden citation is visible
630 Previously the citation would remain visible in this case. This is
631 fixed so that hiding a message hides all parts.
633 Notmuch 0.5 (2010-11-11)
634 ========================
635 New, general features
636 ---------------------
637 Maildir-flag synchronization
639 Notmuch now knows how to synchronize flags in maildir filenames with
640 tags in the notmuch database. The following flag/tag mappings are
649 'S' unread (added when 'S' flag is not present)
651 The synchronization occurs in both directions, (for example, adding
652 the 'S' flag to a file will cause the "unread" tag to be added, and
653 adding the "replied" tag to a message will cause the file to be
654 renamed with an 'R' flag).
656 This synchronization is enabled by default for users of the
657 command-line interface, (though only files in directories named
658 "cur" or "new" will be renamed). It can be disabled by setting the
659 new maildir.synchronize_flags option in the configuration file. For
662 notmuch config set maildir.synchronize_flags false
664 Users upgrading may also want to run "notmuch setup" once (just
665 accept the existing configuration) to get a new, nicely-commented
666 [maildir] section added to the configuration file.
668 For users of the notmuch library, the new synchronization
669 functionality is available with the following two new functions:
671 notmuch_message_maildir_flags_to_tags
672 notmuch_message_tags_to_maildir_flags
674 It is anticipated that future improvements to this support will
675 allow for safe synchronization of the 'T' flag with the "deleted"
676 tag, as well as support for custom flag/tag mappings.
680 Support for querying multiple filenames for a single message
682 It is common for the mailstore to contain multiple files with the
683 same message ID. Previously, notmuch would always hide these
684 duplicate files, (returning a single, arbitrary filename with
685 notmuch_message_get_filename).
687 With this release, library users can access all filenames for a
688 message with the new function:
690 notmuch_message_get_filenames
692 Together with notmuch_filenames_valid, notmuch_filenames_get, and
693 notmuch_filenames_move_to_next it is now possible to iterate over
694 all available filenames for a given message.
696 New command-line features
697 -------------------------
698 New "notmuch show --format=raw" for getting at original email contents
700 This new feature allows for a fully-functional email client to be
701 built on top of the notmuch command-line without needing any direct
702 access to the mail store itself.
704 For example, it's now possible to run "emacs -f notmuch" on a local
705 machine with only ssh access to the mail store/notmuch database. To
706 do this, simply set the notmuch-command variable in emacs to the
707 name of a script containing:
709 ssh user@host notmuch "$@"
711 If the ssh client has enabled connection sharing (ControlMaster
712 option in OpenSSH), the emacs interface can be quite responsive this
717 Fix "notmuch search" to print nothing when nothing matches
719 The 0.4 release had a bug in which:
721 notmuch search <expression-with-no-matches>
723 would produce a single blank line of output, (where previous
724 versions would produce no output. This fix also causes a change in
725 the --format=json output, (which would previously produce "[]" and
726 now produces nothing).
728 Emacs interface improvements
729 ----------------------------
730 Fix to allow pipe ('|') command to work when using notmuch over ssh
732 Fix count of lines in hidden signatures.
734 Omit repeated subject lines in (collapsed) thread display.
736 Display current thread subject in a header line.
738 Provide a "c i" binding to copy a thread ID from the search view.
740 Allow for notmuch-fcc-dirs to have a value of nil.
742 Also, the more complex form of notmuch-fcc-dirs now has a slightly
743 different format. It no longer has a special first-element, fallback
744 string. Instead it's now a list of cons cells where the car of each
745 cell is a regular expression to be matched against the sender
746 address, and the cdr is the name of a folder to use for an FCC. So
747 the old fallback behavior can be achieved by including a final cell
748 of (".*" . "default-fcc-folder").
750 Vim interface improvements
751 --------------------------
752 Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface.
754 These include optimizations, support for newer versions of vim, fixed
755 support for sending mail on modern systems, new commands, and
760 Added initial ruby bindings in bindings/ruby
762 Notmuch 0.4 (2010-11-01)
763 ========================
764 New command-line features
765 -------------------------
766 notmuch search --output=(summary|threads|messages|tags|files)
768 This new option allows for particular items to be returned from
769 notmuch searches. The "summary" option is the default and behaves
770 just as "notmuch search" has historically behaved.
772 The new option values allow for thread IDs, message IDs, lists of
773 tags, and lists of filenames to be returned from searches. It is
774 expected that this new option will be very useful in shell
775 scripts. For example:
777 for file in $(notmuch search --output=files <search-terms>); do
778 <operations-on> "$file"
781 notmuch show --format=mbox <search-specification>
783 This new option allows for the messages matching a search
784 specification to be presented as an mbox. Specifically the "mboxrd"
785 format is used which allows for reversible quoting of lines
786 beginning with "From ". A reader should remove a single '>' from the
787 beginning of all lines beginning with one or more '>' characters
788 followed by the 5 characters "From ".
790 notmuch config [get|set] <section>.<item> [value ...]
792 The new top-level "config" command allows for any value in the
793 notmuch configuration file to be queried or set to a new value. Both
794 single-valued and multi-valued items are supported, as our any
795 custom items stored in the configuration file.
797 Avoid setting Bcc header in "notmuch reply"
799 We decided that this was a bit heavy-handed as the actual mail
800 user-agent should be responsible for setting any Bcc option. Also,
801 see below for the notmuch/emacs user-agent now setting an Fcc by
802 default rather than Bcc.
806 Add notmuch_query_get_query_string and notmuch_query_get_sort
808 These are simply functions for querying properties of a
809 notmuch_query_t object.
813 Enable Fcc of all sent messages by default (to "sent" directory)
815 All messages sent from the emacs interface will now be saved to the
816 notmuch mail store where they will be incorporated to the database
817 by the next "notmuch new". By default, messages are saved to the
818 "sent" directory at the top-level of the mail store. This directory
819 can be customized by means of the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" option in the
820 notmuch customize interface.
822 Ability to all open messages in a thread to a pipe
824 Historically, the '|' keybinding allows for piping a single message
825 to an external command. Now, by prefixing this key with a prefix
826 argument, (for example, by pressing "Control-U |"), all open
827 messages in the current thread will be sent to the external command.
829 Optional support for detecting inline patches
831 This hook is disabled by default but can be enabled with a checkbox
832 under "Notmuch Show Insert Text/Plain Hook" in the notmuch customize
833 interface. It allows for inline patches to be detected and treated
834 as if they were attachments, (with context-sensitive highlighting).
836 Automatically tag messages as "replied" when sending a reply
838 Messages replied to within the emacs interface will now be tagged as
839 "replied". This feature can easily be customized to add or remove
840 other tags as well. For example, a user might use a tag of
841 "needs-reply" and can configure this feature to automatically remove
842 that tag when replying. See "Notmuch Message Mark Replied" in the
843 notmuch customize interface.
845 Allow search-result color specifications to overlay each other
847 For example, one tag can specify the background color of matching
848 lines, while another can specify the foreground. With this change,
849 both settings will now be visible simultaneously, (which was not the
850 case in previous releases). See "Notmuch Search Line Faces" in the
851 notmuch customize interface.
853 Make hidden author names still available for incremental search.
855 When there is insufficient space to display all authors of a thread
856 in search results, the names of hidden authors are now still made
857 available to emacs' incremental search commands. As the user
858 searches, matching lines will temporarily expand to show the hidden
861 New binding of Control-TAB (works like TAB in reverse)
863 Many notmuch nodes already use TAB to navigate forward through
864 various items allowing actions, (message headers, email attachments,
865 etc.). The new Control-TAB binding operates similarly but in the
868 New build-system features
869 -------------------------
870 Various portability fixes have been applied
872 These include fixes for build failures on at least Solaris, FreeBSD,
873 and Fedora systems. We're hopeful that the notmuch code base is now
874 more portable than ever before.
876 Arrange for libnotmuch to be found automatically after make install
878 The notmuch build system is now careful to help the user avoid
879 errors of the form "libnotmuch.so could not be found" immediately
880 after installing. This support takes two forms:
882 1. If the library is installed to a system directory,
883 (configured in /etc/ld.so.conf), then "make install" will
884 automatically run ldconfig.
886 2. If the library is installed to a non-system directory, the
887 build system adds a DR_RUNPATH entry to the final binary
888 pointing to the directory to which the library is installed.
890 When this support works, the user should be able to run notmuch
891 immediately after "make install", without any errors trying to find
892 the notmuch library, and without having to manually set environment
893 variables such as LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
895 Check compiler/linker options before using them
897 The configure script now carefully checks that any desired
898 compilation options, (whether for enabling compiler warnings, or for
899 embedding rpath, etc.), are supported. Only supported options are
900 used in the resulting Makefile.
902 New test-suite features
903 -----------------------
904 New modularization of test suite.
906 Thanks to a gracious relicensing of the test-suite infrastructure
907 from the git project, notmuch now has a modular test suite. This
908 provides the ability to run individual sections of the test suite
909 rather than the whole things. It also provides better summary of
910 test results, with support for tests that are expected to fail
911 (BROKEN and FIXED) in addition to PASS and FAIL. Finally, it makes
912 it easy to run the test suite within valgrind (pass --valgrind to
913 notmuch-test or to any sub-script) which has been very useful.
915 New testing of emacs interface.
917 The test suite has been augmented to allow automated testing of the
918 emacs interfaces. So far, this includes basic searches, display of
919 threads, and tag manipulation. This also includes a test that a new
920 message can successfully be sent out through a (dummy) SMTP server
921 and that said message is successfully integrated into the notmuch
922 database via the FCC setting.
926 Fix potential corruption of database when "notmuch new " is interrupted.
928 Previously, an interruption of "notmuch new" would (rarely) result
929 in a corrupt database. The corruption would manifest itself by a
930 persistent error of the form:
932 document ID of 1234 has no thread ID
934 The message-adding code has been carefully audited and reworked to
935 avoid this sort of corruption regardless of when it is interrupted.
937 Fix failure with extremely long message ID headers.
939 Previously, a message with an extremely long message ID, (say, more
940 than 300 characters), would fail to be added to notmuch, (triggering
941 Xapian exceptions). This has now been fixed.
943 Fix for messages with "charset=unknown-8bit"
945 Previously, messages with this charset would cause notmuch to emit a
946 GMime warning, (which would then trip up emacs or other interfaces
947 parsing the notmuch results).
949 Fix notmuch_query_search_threads function to return NULL on any exception
951 Fix "notmuch search" to return non-zero if notmuch_query_search_threads fails
953 Previously, this command could confusingly report a Xapian
954 exception, yet still return an error code of 0. It now correctly
955 returns a failing error code of 1 in this case.
959 Fix to handle a message with a subject containing, for example "[1234]"
961 Previously, a message subject containing a sequence of digits within
962 square brackets would cause the emacs interface to mis-parse the
963 output of "notmuch search". This would result in the message being
964 mis-displayed and prevent the user from manipulating the message in
967 Fix to correctly handle message IDs containing ".."
969 The emacs interface now properly quotes message IDs to avoid a
970 Xapian bug in which the ".." within a message ID would be
971 misinterpreted as a numeric range specification.
975 The python bindings for notmuch have been updated to work with python3.
977 Debian-specific fixes
978 ---------------------
979 Fix emacs initialization so "M-x notmuch" works for users by default.
981 Now, a new Debian user can immediately run "emacs -f notmuch" after
982 "apt-get install notmuch". Previously, the user would have had to
983 edit the ~/.emacs file to add "(require 'notmuch)" before this would
986 Notmuch 0.3.1 (2010-04-27)
987 ==========================
990 Fix an infinite loop in "notmuch reply"
992 This bug could be triggered by replying to a message where the
993 user's primary email address did not appear in the To: header and
994 the user had not configured any secondary email addresses. The bug
995 was a simple re-use of the same iterator variable in nested loops.
997 Fix a potential SEGV in "notmuch search"
999 This bug could be triggered by an author name ending in a ','.
1000 Admittedly - that's almost certainly a spam email, but we never
1001 want notmuch to crash.
1005 Fix calculations for line wrapping in the primary "notmuch" view.
1007 Fix Fcc support to prompt to create a directory if the specified Fcc
1008 directory does not exist.
1012 Fix build on OpenSolaris (at least) due to missing 'extern "C"' block.
1014 Without this, the C++ sources could not find strcasestr and the
1015 final linking of notmuch would fail.
1017 Notmuch 0.3 (2010-04-27)
1018 ========================
1019 New command-line features
1020 -------------------------
1021 User-configurable tags for new messages
1023 A new "new.tags" option is available in the configuration file to
1024 determine which tags are applied to new messages. Run "notmuch
1025 setup" to generate new documentation within ~/.notmuch-config on how
1026 to specify this value.
1028 Threads search results named based on subjects that match search
1030 This means that when new mails arrived to a thread you've previously
1031 read, and the new mails have a new subject, you will see that
1032 subject in the search results rather than the old subject.
1034 Faster operation of "notmuch tag" (avoid unneeded sorting)
1036 Since the user just wants to tag all matching messages, we can make
1037 things perform a bit faster by avoiding the sort.
1039 Even Better guessing of From: header for "notmuch reply"
1041 Notmuch now looks at a number of headers when trying to figure out
1042 the best From: header to use in a reply. This is helpful if you have
1043 several configured email addresses, and you also subscribe to various
1044 mailing lists with different addresses, (so that mails you are
1045 replying to won't always include your subscribed address in the To:
1048 Indication of author names that match a search
1050 When notmuch displays threads as the result of a search, it now
1051 lists the authors that match the search before listing the other
1052 authors in the thread. It inserts a pipe '|' symbol between the last
1053 matching and first non-matching author. This is especially useful in
1054 a search that includes tag:unread. Now the authors of the unread
1055 messages in the thread are listed first.
1057 New: Python bindings
1058 --------------------
1059 Sebastian Spaeth has contributed his python bindings for the notmuch
1060 library to the central repository. These bindings were previously
1061 known as "cnotmuch" within python but have now been renamed to be
1062 accessible with a simple, and more official-looking "import notmuch".
1064 The bindings have already proven very useful as people proficient in
1065 python have been able to easily develop programs to do notmuch-based
1066 searches for email-address completion, maildir-flag synchronization,
1069 These bindings are available within the bindings/python directory, but
1070 are not yet integrated into the top-level Makefiles, nor the top-level
1071 package-building scripts. Improvements are welcome.
1073 Emacs interface improvements
1074 ----------------------------
1075 An entirely new initial view for notmuch, (friendly yet powerful)
1077 Some of us call the new view "notmuch hello" but you can get at it
1078 by simply calling "emacs -f notmuch". The new view provides a search
1079 bar where new searches can be performed. It also displays a list of
1080 recent searches, along with a button to save any of these, giving it
1081 a new name as a "saved search". Many people find these "saved
1082 searches" one of the most convenient ways of organizing their mail,
1083 (providing all of the features of "folders" in other mail clients,
1084 but without any of the disadvantages).
1086 Finally, this view can also optionally display all of the tags that
1087 exist in the database, along with a count for each tag, and a custom
1088 search of messages with that tag that's simply a click (or keypress)
1091 Note: For users that liked the original mode of "emacs -f notmuch"
1092 immediately displaying a particular search result, we
1093 recommend instead running something like:
1095 emacs --eval '(notmuch search "tag:inbox" t)'
1097 The "t" means to sort the messages in an "oldest first" order,
1098 (as notmuch would do previously by default). You can also
1099 leave that off to have your search results in "newest first"
1102 Full-featured "customize" support for configuring notmuch
1104 Notmuch now plugs in well to the emacs "customize" mode to make it
1105 much simpler to find things about the notmuch interface that can be
1106 tweaked by the user.
1108 You can get to this mode by starting at the main "Customize" menu in
1109 emacs, then browsing through "Applications", "Mail", and
1110 "Notmuch". Or you can go straight to "M-x customize-group"
1113 Once you're at the customize screen, you'll see a list of documented
1114 options that can be manipulated along with checkboxes, drop-down
1115 selectors, and text-entry boxes for configuring the various
1118 Support for doing tab-completion of email addresses
1120 This support currently relies on an external program,
1121 (notmuch-addresses), that is not yet shipped with notmuch
1122 itself. But multiple, suitable implementations of this program have
1123 already been written that generate address completions by doing
1124 notmuch searches of your email collection. For example, providing
1125 first those addresses that you have composed messages to in the
1128 One such program (implemented in python with the python bindings to
1129 notmuch) is available via:
1131 git clone http://jkr.acm.jhu.edu/git/notmuch_addresses.git
1133 Install that program as notmuch-addresses on your PATH, and then
1134 hitting TAB on a partial email address or name within the To: or Cc:
1135 line of an email message will provide matching completions.
1137 Support for file-based (Fcc) delivery of sent messages to mail store
1139 This isn't yet enabled by default. To enable this, one will have to
1140 set the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" setting within the notmuch customize
1141 screen, (see its documentation there for details). We anticipate
1142 making this automatic in a future release.
1144 New 'G' key binding to trigger mail refresh (G == "Get new mail")
1146 The 'G' key works wherever '=' works. Before refreshing the screen
1147 it calls an external program that can be used to poll email servers,
1148 run notmuch new and setup specific tags for the new emails. The
1149 script to be called should be configured with the "Notmuch Poll
1150 Script" setting in the customize interface. This script will
1151 typically invoke "notmuch new" and then perhaps several "notmuch
1154 Implement emacs message display with the JSON output from notmuch.
1156 This is much more robust than the previous implementation, (where
1157 some HTML mails and mail quoting the notmuch code with the delimiter
1158 characters in it would cause the parser to fall over).
1160 Better handling of HTML messages and MIME attachments (inline images!)
1162 Allow for any MIME parts that emacs can display to be displayed
1163 inline. This includes inline viewing of image attachments, (provided
1164 the window is large enough to fit the image at its natural size).
1166 Much more robust handling of HTML messages. Currently both text/plain
1167 and text/html alternates will be rendered next to each other. In a
1168 future release, users will be able to decide to see only one or the
1169 other representation.
1171 Each attachment now has its own button so that attachments can be
1172 saved individually (the 'w' key is still available to save all
1175 Customizable support for tidying of text/plain message content
1177 Many new functions are available for tidying up message
1178 content. These include options such as wrapping long lines,
1179 compressing duplicate blank lines, etc.
1181 Most of these are disabled by default, but can easily be enabled by
1182 clicking the available check boxes under the "Notmuch Show Insert
1183 Text/Plain Hook" within the notmuch customize screen.
1185 New support for searchable citations (even when hidden)
1187 When portions of overly-long citations are hidden, the contents of
1188 these citations will still be available for emacs' standard
1189 "incremental search" functions. When the search matches any portion
1190 of a hidden citation, the citation will become visible temporarily
1191 to display the search result.
1193 More flexible handling of header visibility
1195 As an answer to complaints from many users, the To, Cc, and Date
1196 headers of messages are no longer hidden by default. For those users
1197 that liked that these were hidden, a new "Notmuch Messages Headers
1198 Visible" option in the customize interface can be set to nil. The
1199 visibility of headers can still be toggled on a per-message basis
1200 with the 'h' keybinding.
1202 For users that don't want to see some subset of those headers, the
1203 new "Notmuch Message Headers" variable can be customized to list
1204 only those headers that should be present in the display of a message.
1206 The Return key now toggles message visibility anywhere
1208 Previously this worked only on the first summary-line of a message.
1210 Customizable formatting of search results
1212 The user can easily customize the order, width, and formatting of
1213 the various fields in a "notmuch search" buffer. See the "Notmuch
1214 Search Result Format" section of the customize interface.
1216 Generate nicer names for search buffers when using a saved search.
1218 Add a notmuch User-Agent header when sending mail from notmuch/emacs.
1220 New keybinding (M-Ret) to open all collapsed messages in a thread.
1224 Provide a new NOTMUCH_SORT_UNSORTED value for queries
1226 This can be somewhat faster when sorting simply isn't desired. For
1227 example when collecting a set of messages that will all be
1228 manipulated identically, (adding a tag, removing a tag, deleting the
1229 messages), then there's no advantage to sorting the messages by
1234 Fix to compile against GMime 2.6
1236 Previously notmuch insisted on being able to find GMime 2.4, (even
1237 though GMime 2.6 would have worked all along).
1239 Fix configure script to accept (and ignore) various standard options.
1241 For example, those that the Gentoo build scripts expect configure to
1242 accept are now all accepted.
1246 A large number of new tests for the many new features.
1248 Better display of output from failed tests.
1250 Now shows failures with diff rather than forcing the user to gaze at
1251 complete actual and expected output looking for deviation.
1253 Notmuch 0.2 (2010-04-16)
1254 ========================
1255 This is the second release of the notmuch mail system, with actual
1256 detailed release notes this time!
1258 This release consists of a number of minor new features that make
1259 notmuch more pleasant to use, and a few fairly major bug fixes.
1261 We didn't quite hit our release target of "about a week" from the 0.1
1262 release, (0.2 is happening 11 days after 0.1), but we hope to do
1263 better for next week. Look forward to some major features coming to
1264 notmuch in subsequent releases.
1270 Better guessing of From: header.
1272 Notmuch now tries harder to guess which configured address should be
1273 used as the From: line in a "notmuch reply". It will examine the
1274 Received: headers if it fails to find any configured address in To:
1275 or Cc:. This allows it to often choose the correct address even when
1276 replying to a message sent to a mailing list, and not directly to a
1279 Make "notmuch count" with no arguments count all messages
1281 Previously, it was hard to construct a search term that was
1282 guaranteed to match all messages.
1284 Provide a new special-case search term of "*" to match all messages.
1286 This can be used in any command accepting a search term, such as
1287 "notmuch search '*'". Note that you'll want to take care that the
1288 shell doesn't expand * against the current files. And note that the
1289 support for "*" is a special case. It's only meaningful as a single
1290 search term and loses its special meaning when combined with any
1293 Automatically detect thread connections even when a parent message is
1296 Previously, if two or more message were received with a common
1297 parent, but that parent was not received, then these messages would
1298 not be recognized as belonging to the same thread. This is now fixed
1299 so that such messages are properly connected in a thread.
1303 Fix potential data loss in "notmuch new" with SIGINT
1305 One code path in "notmuch new" was not properly handling
1306 SIGINT. Previously, this could lead to messages being removed from
1307 the database (and their tags being lost) if the user pressed
1308 Control-C while "notmuch new" was working.
1310 Fix segfault when a message includes a MIME part that is empty.
1312 Fix handling of non-ASCII characters with --format=json
1314 Previously, characters outside the range of 7-bit ASCII were
1315 silently dropped from the JSON output. This led to corrupted display
1316 of utf-8 content in the upcoming notmuch web-based frontends.
1318 Fix headers to be properly decoded in "notmuch reply"
1320 Previously, the user might see:
1322 Subject: Re: =?iso-8859-2?q?Rozlu=E8ka?=
1326 Subject: Re: Rozlučka
1328 The former text is properly encoded to be RFC-compliant SMTP, will
1329 be sent correctly, and will be properly decoded by the
1330 recipient. But the user trying to edit the reply would likely be
1331 unable to read or edit that field in its encoded form.
1333 Emacs client features
1334 ---------------------
1335 Show the last few lines of citations as well as the first few lines.
1337 It's often the case that the last sentence of a citation is what is
1338 being replied to directly, so the last few lines are often much more
1339 important. The number of lines shown at the beginning and end of any
1340 citation can be configured, (notmuch-show-citation-lines-prefix and
1341 notmuch-show-citation-lines-suffix).
1343 The '+' and '-' commands in the search view can now add and remove
1346 Selective bulk tagging is now possible by selecting a region of
1347 threads and then using either the '+' or '-' keybindings. Bulk
1348 tagging is still available for all threads matching the current
1349 search with the '*' binding.
1351 More meaningful buffer names for thread-view buffers.
1353 Notmuch now uses the Subject of the thread as the buffer
1354 name. Previously it was using the thread ID, which is a meaningless
1357 Provide for customized colors of threads in search view based on tags.
1359 See the documentation of notmuch-search-line-faces, (or us "M-x
1360 customize" and browse to the "notmuch" group within "Applications"
1361 and "Mail"), for details on how to configure this colorization.
1363 Build-system features
1364 ---------------------
1365 Add support to properly build libnotmuch on Darwin systems (OS X).
1367 Add support to configure for many standard options.
1369 We include actual support for:
1371 --includedir --mandir --sysconfdir
1373 And accept and silently ignore several more:
1375 --build --infodir --libexecdir --localstatedir
1376 --disable-maintainer-mode --disable-dependency-tracking
1378 Install emacs client in "make install" rather than requiring a
1379 separate "make install-emacs".
1381 Automatically compute versions numbers between releases.
1383 This support uses the git-describe notation, so a version such as
1384 0.1-144-g43cbbfc indicates a version that is 144 commits since the
1385 0.1 release and is available as git commit "43cbbfc".
1387 Add a new "make test" target to run the test suite and actually verify
1390 Notmuch 0.1 (2010-04-05)
1391 ========================
1392 This is the first release of the notmuch mail system.
1394 It includes the libnotmuch library, the notmuch command-line
1395 interface, and an emacs-based interface to notmuch.
1397 Note: Notmuch will work best with Xapian 1.0.18 (or later) or Xapian
1398 1.1.4 (or later). Previous versions of Xapian (whether 1.0 or 1.1) had
1399 a performance bug that made notmuch very slow when modifying
1400 tags. This would cause distracting pauses when reading mail while
1401 notmuch would wait for Xapian when removing the "inbox" and "unread"
1402 tags from messages in a thread.