1 Notmuch 0.3.1 (2010-04-27)
2 ==========================
5 Fix an infinite loop in "notmuch reply"
7 This bug could be triggered by replying to a message where the
8 user's primary email address did not appear in the To: header and
9 the user had not configured any secondary email addresses. The bug
10 was a simple re-use of the same iterator variable in nested loops.
14 Fix calculations for line wrapping in the primary "notmuch" view.
16 Fix Fcc support to prompt to create a directory if the specified Fcc
17 directory does not exist.
21 Fix build on OpenSolaris (at least) due to missing 'extern "C"' block.
23 Without this, the C++ sources could not find strcasestr and the
24 final linking of notmuch would fail.
26 Notmuch 0.3 (2010-04-27)
27 ========================
28 New command-line features
29 -------------------------
30 User-configurable tags for new messages
32 A new "new.tags" option is available in the configuration file to
33 determine which tags are applied to new messages. Run "notmuch
34 setup" to generate new documentation within ~/.notmuch-config on how
35 to specify this value.
37 Threads search results named based on subjects that match search
39 This means that when new mails arrived to a thread you've previously
40 read, and the new mails have a new subject, you will see that
41 subject in the search results rather than the old subject.
43 Faster operation of "notmuch tag" (avoid unneeded sorting)
45 Since the user just wants to tag all matching messages, we can make
46 things perform a bit faster by avoiding the sort.
48 Even Better guessing of From: header for "notmuch reply"
50 Notmuch now looks at a number of headers when trying to figure out
51 the best From: header to use in a reply. This is helpful if you have
52 several configured email addresses, and you also subscribe to various
53 mailing lists with different addresses, (so that mails you are
54 replying to won't always include your subscribed address in the To:
57 Indication of author names that match a search
59 When notmuch displays threads as the result of a search, it now
60 lists the authors that match the search before listing the other
61 authors in the thread. It inserts a pipe '|' symbol between the last
62 matching and first non-matching author. This is especially useful in
63 a search that includes tag:unread. Now the authors of the unread
64 messages in the thread are listed first.
68 Sebastian Spaeth has contributed his python bindings for the notmuch
69 library to the central repository. These bindings were previously
70 known as "cnotmuch" within python but have now been renamed to be
71 accessible with a simple, and more official-looking "import notmuch".
73 The bindings have already proven very useful as people proficient in
74 python have been able to easily develop programs to do notmuch-based
75 searches for email-address completion, maildir-flag synchronization,
78 These bindings are available within the bindings/python directory, but
79 are not yet integrated into the top-level Makefiles, nor the top-level
80 package-building scripts. Improvements are welcome.
82 Emacs interface improvements
83 ----------------------------
84 An entirely new initial view for notmuch, (friendly yet powerful)
86 Some of us call the new view "notmuch hello" but you can get at it
87 by simply calling "emacs -f notmuch". The new view provides a search
88 bar where new searches can be performed. It also displays a list of
89 recent searches, along with a button to save any of these, giving it
90 a new name as a "saved search". Many people find these "saved
91 searches" one of the most convenient ways of organizing their mail,
92 (providing all of the features of "folders" in other mail clients,
93 but without any of the disadvantages).
95 Finally, this view can also optionally display all of the tags that
96 exist in the database, along with a count for each tag, and a custom
97 search of messages with that tag that's simply a click (or keypress)
100 Note: For users that liked the original mode of "emacs -f notmuch"
101 immediately displaying a particular search result, we
102 recommend instead running something like:
104 emacs --eval '(notmuch search "tag:inbox" t)'
106 The "t" means to sort the messages in an "oldest first" order,
107 (as notmuch would do previously by default). You can also
108 leave that off to have your search results in "newest first"
111 Full-featured "customize" support for configuring notmuch
113 Notmuch now plugs in well to the emacs "customize" mode to make it
114 much simpler to find things about the notmuch interface that can be
117 You can get to this mode by starting at the main "Customize" menu in
118 emacs, then browsing through "Applications", "Mail", and
119 "Notmuch". Or you can go straight to "M-x customize-group"
122 Once you're at the customize screen, you'll see a list of documented
123 options that can be manipulated along with checkboxes, drop-down
124 selectors, and text-entry boxes for configuring the various
127 Support for doing tab-completion of email addresses
129 This support currently relies on an external program,
130 (notmuch-addresses), that is not yet shipped with notmuch
131 itself. But multiple, suitable implementations of this program have
132 already been written that generate address completions by doing
133 notmuch searches of your email collection. For example, providing
134 first those addresses that you have composed messages to in the
137 One such program (implemented in python with the python bindings to
138 notmuch) is available via:
140 git clone http://jkr.acm.jhu.edu/git/notmuch_addresses.git
142 Install that program as notmuch-addresses on your PATH, and then
143 hitting TAB on a partial email address or name within the To: or Cc:
144 line of an email message will provide matching completions.
146 Support for file-based (Fcc) delivery of sent messages to mail store
148 This isn't yet enabled by default. To enable this, one will have to
149 set the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" setting within the notmuch customize
150 screen, (see its documentation there for details). We anticipate
151 making this automatic in a future release.
153 New 'G' key binding to trigger mail refresh (G == "Get new mail")
155 The 'G' key works wherever '=' works. Before refreshing the screen
156 it calls an external program that can be used to poll email servers,
157 run notmuch new and setup specific tags for the new emails. The
158 script to be called should be configured with the "Notmuch Poll
159 Script" setting in the customize interface. This script will
160 typically invoke "notmuch new" and then perhaps several "notmuch
163 Implement emacs message display with the JSON output from notmuch.
165 This is much more robust than the previous implementation, (where
166 some HTML mails and mail quoting the notmuch code with the delimiter
167 characters in it would cause the parser to fall over).
169 Better handling of HTML messages and MIME attachments (inline images!)
171 Allow for any MIME parts that emacs can display to be displayed
172 inline. This includes inline viewing of image attachments, (provided
173 the window is large enough to fit the image at its natural size).
175 Much more robust handling of HTML messages. Currently both text/plain
176 and text/html alternates will be rendered next to each other. In a
177 future release, users will be able to decide to see only one or the
178 other representation.
180 Each attachment now has its own button so that attachments can be
181 saved individually (the 'w' key is still available to save all
184 Customizable support for tidying of text/plain message content
186 Many new functions are available for tidying up message
187 content. These include options such as wrapping long lines,
188 compressing duplicate blank lines, etc.
190 Most of these are disabled by default, but can easily be enabled by
191 clicking the available check boxes under the "Notmuch Show Insert
192 Text/Plain Hook" within the notmuch customize screen.
194 New support for searchable citations (even when hidden)
196 When portions of overly-long citations are hidden, the contents of
197 these citations will still be available for emacs' standard
198 "incremental search" functions. When the search matches any portion
199 of a hidden citation, the citation will become visible temporarily
200 to display the search result.
202 More flexible handling of header visibility
204 As an answer to complaints from many users, the To, Cc, and Date
205 headers of messages are no longer hidden by default. For those users
206 that liked that these were hidden, a new "Notmuch Messages Headers
207 Visible" option in the customize interface can be set to nil. The
208 visibility of headers can still be toggled on a per-message basis
209 with the 'h' keybinding.
211 For users that don't want to see some subset of those headers, the
212 new "Notmuch Message Headers" variable can be customized to list
213 only those headers that should be present in the display of a message.
215 The Return key now toggles message visibility anywhere
217 Previously this worked only on the first summary-line of a message.
219 Customizable formatting of search results
221 The user can easily customize the order, width, and formatting of
222 the various fields in a "notmuch search" buffer. See the "Notmuch
223 Search Result Format" section of the customize interface.
225 Generate nicer names for search buffers when using a saved search.
227 Add a notmuch User-Agent header when sending mail from notmuch/emacs.
229 New keybinding (M-Ret) to open all collapsed messages in a thread.
233 Provide a new NOTMUCH_SORT_UNSORTED value for queries
235 This can be somewhat faster when sorting simply isn't desired. For
236 example when collecting a set of messages that will all be
237 manipulated identically, (adding a tag, removing a tag, deleting the
238 messages), then there's no advantage to sorting the messages by
243 Fix to compile against GMime 2.6
245 Previously notmuch insisted on being able to find GMime 2.4, (even
246 though GMime 2.6 would have worked all along).
248 Fix configure script to accept (and ignore) various standard options.
250 For example, those that the gentoo build scripts expect configure to
251 accept are now all accepted.
255 A large number of new tests for the many new features.
257 Better display of output from failed tests.
259 Now shows failures with diff rather than forcing the user to gaze at
260 complete actual and expected output looking for deviation.
262 Notmuch 0.2 (2010-04-16)
263 ========================
264 This is the second release of the notmuch mail system, with actual
265 detailed release notes this time!
267 This release consists of a number of minor new features that make
268 notmuch more pleasant to use, and a few fairly major bug fixes.
270 We didn't quite hit our release target of "about a week" from the 0.1
271 release, (0.2 is happening 11 days after 0.1), but we hope to do
272 better for next week. Look forward to some major features coming to
273 notmuch in subsequent releases.
279 Better guessing of From: header.
281 Notmuch now tries harder to guess which configured address should be
282 used as the From: line in a "notmuch reply". It will examine the
283 Received: headers if it fails to find any configured address in To:
284 or Cc:. This allows it to often choose the correct address even when
285 replying to a message sent to a mailing list, and not directly to a
288 Make "notmuch count" with no arguments count all messages
290 Previously, it was hard to construct a search term that was
291 guaranteed to match all messages.
293 Provide a new special-case search term of "*" to match all messages.
295 This can be used in any command accepting a search term, such as
296 "notmuch search '*'". Note that you'll want to take care that the
297 shell doesn't expand * against the current files. And note that the
298 support for "*" is a special case. It's only meaningful as a single
299 search term and loses its special meaning when combined with any
302 Automatically detect thread connections even when a parent message is
305 Previously, if two or more message were received with a common
306 parent, but that parent was not received, then these messages would
307 not be recognized as belonging to the same thread. This is now fixed
308 so that such messages are properly connected in a thread.
312 Fix potential data loss in "notmuch new" with SIGINT
314 One code path in "notmuch new" was not properly handling
315 SIGINT. Previously, this could lead to messages being removed from
316 the database (and their tags being lost) if the user pressed
317 Control-C while "notmuch new" was working.
319 Fix segfault when a message includes a MIME part that is empty.
321 Fix handling of non-ASCII characters with --format=json
323 Previously, characters outside the range of 7-bit ASCII were
324 silently dropped from the JSON output. This led to corrupted display
325 of utf-8 content in the upcoming notmuch web-based frontends.
327 Fix headers to be properly decoded in "notmuch reply"
329 Previously, the user might see:
331 Subject: Re: =?iso-8859-2?q?Rozlu=E8ka?=
335 Subject: Re: Rozlučka
337 The former text is properly encoded to be RFC-compliant SMTP, will
338 be sent correctly, and will be properly decoded by the
339 recipient. But the user trying to edit the reply would likely be
340 unable to read or edit that field in its encoded form.
342 Emacs client features
343 ---------------------
344 Show the last few lines of citations as well as the first few lines.
346 It's often the case that the last sentence of a citation is what is
347 being replied to directly, so the last few lines are often much more
348 important. The number of lines shown at the beginning and end of any
349 citation can be configured, (notmuch-show-citation-lines-prefix and
350 notmuch-show-citation-lines-suffix).
352 The '+' and '-' commands in the search view can now add and remove
355 Selective bulk tagging is now possible by selecting a region of
356 threads and then using either the '+' or '-' keybindings. Bulk
357 tagging is still available for all threads matching the current
358 search with th '*' binding.
360 More meaningful buffer names for thread-view buffers.
362 Notmuch now uses the Subject of the thread as the buffer
363 name. Previously it was using the thread ID, which is a meaningless
366 Provide for customized colors of threads in search view based on tags.
368 See the documentation of notmuch-search-line-faces, (or us "M-x
369 customize" and browse to the "notmuch" group within "Applications"
370 and "Mail"), for details on how to configure this colorization.
372 Build-system features
373 ---------------------
374 Add support to properly build libnotmuch on Darwin systems (OS X).
376 Add support to configure for many standard options.
378 We include actual support for:
380 --includedir --mandir --sysconfdir
382 And accept and silently ignore several more:
384 --build --infodir --libexecdir --localstatedir
385 --disable-maintainer-mode --disable-dependency-tracking
387 Install emacs client in "make install" rather than requiring a
388 separate "make install-emacs".
390 Automatically compute versions numbers between releases.
392 This support uses the git-describe notation, so a version such as
393 0.1-144-g43cbbfc indicates a version that is 144 commits since the
394 0.1 release and is available as git commit "43cbbfc".
396 Add a new "make test" target to run the test suite and actually verify
399 Notmuch 0.1 (2010-04-05)
400 ========================
401 This is the first release of the notmuch mail system.
403 It includes the libnotmuch library, the notmuch command-line
404 interface, and an emacs-based interface to notmuch.
406 Note: Notmuch will work best with Xapian 1.0.18 (or later) or Xapian
407 1.1.4 (or later). Previous versions of Xapian (whether 1.0 or 1.1) had
408 a performance bug that made notmuch very slow when modifying
409 tags. This would cause distracting pauses when reading mail while
410 notmuch would wait for Xapian when removing the "inbox" and "unread"
411 tags from messages in a thread.