1 Notmuch 0.8 (2011-09-10)
2 ========================
4 Improved handling of message/rfc822 parts
6 Both in the CLI and the emacs interface. Output of rfc822 parts now
7 includes the primary headers, as well as the body and all subparts.
8 Output of the completely raw rfc822-formatted message, including all
9 headers, is unfortunately not yet supported (but hopefully will be
12 Improved Build system portability
14 Certain parts of the shell script generating notmuch.sym were
15 specific to the GNU versions of sed and nm. The new version should
16 be more portable to e.g. OpenBSD.
18 Documentation update for Ruby bindings
20 Added documentation, typo fixes, and improved support for rdoc.
22 Unicode, iterator, PEP8 changes for python bindings
24 - PEP8 (code formatting) changes for python files.
25 - Remove Tags.__len__ ; see 0.6 release notes for motivation.
26 - Decode headers as UTF8, encode (unicode) database paths as UTF8.
28 Notmuch 0.7 (2011-08-01)
29 ========================
31 Vim interface improvements
32 --------------------------
34 Jason Woofenden provided a number of bug fixes for the Vim interface
36 * fix citation/signature fold lengths
37 * fix cig/cit parsing within multipart/*
38 * fix on-screen instructions for show-signature
39 * fix from list reformatting in search view
40 * fix space key: now archives (did opposite)
42 Uwe Kleine-König contributed
44 * use full path for sendmail/doc fix
45 * fix compose temp file name
47 Python Bindings changes
48 -----------------------
50 Sebastian Spaeth contributed two changes related to unicode and UTF8:
52 * message tags are now explicitly unicode
53 * query string is encoded as a UTF8 byte string
55 Build-System improvments
56 ------------------------
58 Generate notmuch.sym after the relevant object files
60 This fixes a bug in parallel building. Thanks to Thomas Jost for the
63 Notmuch 0.6.1 (2011-07-17)
64 ==========================
69 Re-export Xapian exception typeinfo symbols.
71 It turned out our aggressive symbol hiding caused problems for
72 people running gcc 4.4.5.
74 Notmuch 0.6 (2011-07-01)
75 =======================
78 Folder-based searching
80 Notmuch queries can now include a search term to match the
81 directories in which mail files are stored (within the mail
82 storage). The syntax is as follows:
86 For example, one might use things such as:
92 to match any path containing a directory "spam", "work/todo", or
93 containing a directory starting with "2011-", respectively.
95 This feature is particularly useful for users of delivery-agent
96 software (such as procmail or maildrop) that is filtering mail and
97 delivering it to particular folders, or users of systems such as
98 Gmail that use filesystem directories to indicate message tags.
100 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
101 notmuch will be searchable with folder: terms. In order to enable
102 this feature for all mail, the entire notmuch index will need to be
105 notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
106 # Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
108 notmuch restore notmuch.dump
112 Both the command line interface and the emacs-interface have new
113 support for PGP/MIME, detailed below. Thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor
114 and Jameson Graef Rollins for making this happen.
116 New, automatic tags: "signed" and "encrypted"
118 These tags will automatically be applied to messages containing
119 multipart/signed and multipart/encrypted parts.
121 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
122 notmuch will receive these tags.
124 New command-line features
125 -------------------------
126 Add new "notmuch show --verify" option for signature verification
128 This option instruct notmuch to verify the signature of
129 PGP/MIME-signed parts.
131 Add new "notmuch show --decrypt" and "notmuch reply --decrypt" options
133 This option instructs notmuch to decrypt PGP/MIME-encrypted parts.
134 Note that this feature currently requires gpg-agent and a passphrase entry
135 tool (e.g. pinentry-gtk or pinentry-curses).
137 Proper nesting of multipart parts in "notmuch show" output
139 MIME parts are now display with proper nesting to reflect original
140 MIME hierarchy of a message. This allows clients to correctly
141 analyze the MIME structure, (such as, for example, determining to
142 which parts a signature part applies).
144 Add new "notmuch show --part" option
146 This is a replacement for the older "notmuch part" command, (which
147 is now deprecated—it should still work as always, but is no longer
148 documented). Putting part output under "notmuch show" allows for all
149 of the "notmuch show" options to be applied when extracting a single
150 part, (such as --format=json for extracting a message part with JSON
153 Deprecate "notmuch search-tags", (in favor of "notmuch search --output=tags *")
155 The "notmuch search-tags" sub-command has been redundant since the
156 addition of the --output=tags option to "notmuch search". We now
157 make that more clear by deprecating "notmuch search-tags", (dropping
158 it from the documentation). We do continue to support the old syntax
159 by translating it internally to the new call.
161 Performance improvements
162 ------------------------
163 Faster searches (by doing fewer searches to construct threads)
165 Whenever a user asks for search results as threads, notmuch first
166 performs a search for messages matching the query, then performs
167 additional searches to find other messages in the resulting threads.
169 Removing inefficiencies and redundancies in these secondary searches
170 results in a measured speedups of 1.5x for a typical search.
172 Faster searches (by doing fewer passes to gather message data)
174 Optimizing Xapian data access patterns (using a single pass to get
175 all message-document data rather than a pass for each data type)
176 results in a measured speedup of 1.7x for a typical search.
178 The benefits of this optimization combine with the preceding
179 optimization. With both in place, Austin Clements measured a speedup
180 of 2.5x for a search of all messages in his inbox (was 4.5s, now
181 1.8s). Thanks, Austin!
183 Faster initial indexing
185 More efficient indexing of new messages results in a measured
186 speedup of 1.4x for the initial indexing of 3 GB of mail (1h 14m
187 rather than 1h 46m). Thanks to Austin Clements and Michal Sojka.
189 Make "notmuch new" faster for unchanged directories
191 Optimizing to not do any further examinations of sub-directories
192 when the filesystem indicates that a directory is unchanged from the
193 last "notmuch new" results in measured speedups of 8.5 for the "No
194 new mail" case, (was 0.77s, now 0.09s). Thanks to Karel Zak.
196 New emacs-interface features
197 ----------------------------
199 Support for PGP/MIME (GnuPG)
201 Automatically indicate validity of signatures for multipart/signed
202 messages. Automatically display decrypted content for
203 multipart/encrypted messages. See the emacs variable
204 notmuch-crypto-process-mime for more information. Note that this
205 needs gpg-agent and a pinentry tool just as the command line tools.
206 Also note there is no support SMIME yet.
208 Output of pipe command is now displayed if pipe command fails
210 This is extremely useful in the common use case of piping a patch to
211 "git am". If git fails to cleanly merge the patch the error messages
212 from the failed merge are now clearly displayed to the user, (where
213 previously they were silently hidden from the user).
215 User-selectable From address
217 A user can choose which configured email addresses should be used as
218 the From address whenever composing a new message. To do so, simply
219 press C-u before the command which will open a new message. Emacs
220 will prompt for the from address to use.
222 The user can customize the "Notmuch Identities" setting in the
223 notmuch customize group in order to use addresses other than those in
224 the notmuch configuration file if desired.
226 The user can also choose to always be prompted for the from address
227 when composing a new message (without having to use C-u) by setting
228 the "Notmuch Always Prompt For Sender" option in the notmuch
231 Hiding of repeated subjects in collapsed thread view
233 In notmuch-show mode, if a collapsed message has the same subject as
234 its parent, the subject is not shown.
236 Automatic detection and hiding of original message in top-posted message
238 When a message contains a line looking something like:
240 ----- Original Message -----
242 emacs hides this and all subsequent lines as an "original message",
243 (allowing the user to click or press enter on the "original message"
244 button to display it again). This makes the handling of top-posted
245 citations work much like conventional citations.
247 New hooks for running code when tags are modified
249 Some users want to perform additional actions whenever a particular
250 tag is added/removed from a message. This could be used to, for
251 example, interface with some external spam-recognition training
252 tool. To facilitate this, two new hooks are added which can be
253 modified in the following settings of the notmuch customize group:
255 Notmuch Before Tag Hook
256 Notmuch After Tag Hook
258 New optional support for hiding some multipart/alternative parts
260 Many emails are sent with redundant content within a
261 multipart/alternative group (such as a text/plain part as well as a
262 text/html part). Users can configure the setting:
264 Notmuch Show All Multipart/Alternative Parts
266 to "off" in the notmuch customize group to have the interface
267 automatically hide some part alternatives (such as text/html
268 parts). This new part hiding is not configured by default yet
269 because there's not yet a simple way to re-display such a hidden
270 part if it is not actually redundant with a displayed part.
272 Better rendering of text/x-vcalendar parts
274 These parts are now displayed in a format suitable for use with the
277 Avoid getting confused by Subject and Author fields with newline characters
279 Replacing all characters with ASCII code less than 32 with a question mark.
281 Cleaner display of From line in email messages (remove double quotes,
282 and drop "name" if it's actually just a repeat of the email address).
284 Vim interface improvements
285 --------------------------
286 Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface:
288 * Using sendmail directly rather than mailx,
289 * Implementing archive in show view
290 * Add support to mark as read in show and search views
291 * Add delete commands
294 Bindings improvements
295 ---------------------
296 Ruby bindings are now much more complete
298 Including QUERY.sort, QUERY.to_s, MESSAGE.maildir_flags_to_tags,
299 MESSAGE.tags_to_maildir_flags, and MESSAGE.get_filenames
301 * Python bindings have been upodated and extended
302 (docs online at http://packages.python.org/notmuch/)
305 - Message().get_filenames(),
306 - Message().tags_to_maildir_flags(),Message().maildir_flags_to_tags()
307 - list(Threads()) and list(Messages) works now
309 - Message().__cmp__() and __hash__()
310 These allow, for example:
313 As well as set arithmetic on Messages():
315 s1, s2= set(msgs1), set(msgs2)
320 - len(Messages()) as it exausted the iterator.
321 Use len(list(Messages())) or
322 Query.count_messages() to get the length.
324 Added initial Go bindings in bindings/go
326 New build-system features
327 -------------------------
328 Added support for building in a directory other than the source directory
330 This can be used with the widely-supported idiom of simply running
331 the configure script from some other directory:
338 Fix to save configure options for future, implicit runs of configure
340 When a user updates the source (such as with "git pull") calling
341 "make" may cause an automatic re-run of the configure script. When
342 this happens, the configure script will automatically be called with
343 the same options the user originally passed in the most-recent
344 manual invocation of configure.
346 New test-suite feature
347 ----------------------
348 Binary for bash for running test suite now located via PATH.
350 The notmuch test suite requires a fairly recent version of bash (>=
351 bash 4). As some systems supply an older version of bash at
352 /bin/bash, the test suite is now updated to search $PATH to locate
353 the bash binary. This allows users of systems with old /bin/bash to
354 simply install bash >= 4 somewhere on $PATH before /bin and then use
357 Support for testing output with a trailing newline.
359 Previously, some tests would fail to notice a difference in the
360 presence/absence of a trailing newline in a program output, (which
361 has led to bugs in the past). Now, carefully-written tests (using
362 test_expect_equal_file rather than test_expect_equal) will detect
363 any change in the presence/absence of a trailing newline. Many tests
364 are updated to take advantage of this.
366 Avoiding accessing user's $HOME while running test suite
368 The test suite now carefully creates its own HOME directory. This
369 allows the test suite to be run with no existing HOME directory, (as
370 some build systems apparently do), and avoids test-suite differences
371 due to configuration files in the users HOME directory.
376 Output *all* files for "notmuch search --output=files"
378 For the cases where multiple files have the same Message ID,
379 previous versions of notmuch would output only one such file. This
380 command is now fixed to correctly output all files.
382 Fixed spurious search results from "overlapped" indexing of addresses
384 This fixed a bug where a search for:
386 to:user@elsewhere.com
388 would incorrectly match a message sent:
390 To: user@example,com, someone@elsewhere.com
392 Fix --output=json when search has no results
394 A bug present since notmuch 0.4 had caused searches with no results
395 to produce an invalid json object. This is now fixed to cleanly
396 return a valid json object representing an empty array "[]" as
399 fix the automatic detection of the From address for "notmuch reply"
400 from the Received headers in some cases.
402 Fix core dump on DragonFlyBSD due to -1 return value from
403 sysconf(_SC_GETPW_R_SIZE_MAX).
405 Cleaned up several memory leaks
407 Eliminated a few, rare segmentation faults and a double-free.
409 Fix libnotmuch library to only export notmuch API functions
411 Previous release of the notmuch library also exported some Xapian
412 C++ exception type symbols. These were never part of the library
413 interface and were never intended to be exported.
415 Emacs-interface bug fixes
416 -------------------------
417 Display any unexpected output or errors from "notmuch search" invocations
419 Previously any misformatted output or trailing error messages were
420 silently ignored. This output is now clearly displayed. This fix was
421 very helpful in identifying and fixing the bug described below.
423 Fix bug where some threads would be missing from large search results
425 When a search returned a "large" number of results, the emacs
426 interface was incorrectly dropping one thread every time the output
427 of the "notmuch search" process spanned the emacs read-buffer. This
430 Avoid re-compression of .gz files (and similar) when saving attachment
432 Emacs was being too clever for its own good and trying to
433 re-compress pre-compressed .gz files when saving such attachments
434 (potentially corrupting the attachment). The emacs interface is
435 fixed to avoid this bug.
437 Fix hiding of a message when a previously-hidden citation is visible
439 Previously the citation would remain visible in this case. This is
440 fixed so that hiding a message hides all parts.
442 Notmuch 0.5 (2010-11-11)
443 ========================
444 New, general features
445 ---------------------
446 Maildir-flag synchronization
448 Notmuch now knows how to synchronize flags in maildir filenames with
449 tags in the notmuch database. The following flag/tag mappings are
458 'S' unread (added when 'S' flag is not present)
460 The synchronization occurs in both directions, (for example, adding
461 the 'S' flag to a file will cause the "unread" tag to be added, and
462 adding the "replied" tag to a message will cause the file to be
463 renamed with an 'R' flag).
465 This synchronization is enabled by default for users of the
466 command-line interface, (though only files in directories named
467 "cur" or "new" will be renamed). It can be disabled by setting the
468 new maildir.synchronize_flags option in the configuration file. For
471 notmuch config set maildir.synchronize_flags false
473 Users upgrading may also want to run "notmuch setup" once (just
474 accept the existing configuration) to get a new, nicely-commented
475 [maildir] section added to the configuration file.
477 For users of the notmuch library, the new synchronization
478 functionality is available with the following two new functions:
480 notmuch_message_maildir_flags_to_tags
481 notmuch_message_tags_to_maildir_flags
483 It is anticipated that future improvements to this support will
484 allow for safe synchronization of the 'T' flag with the "deleted"
485 tag, as well as support for custom flag/tag mappings.
489 Support for querying multiple filenames for a single message
491 It is common for the mailstore to contain multiple files with the
492 same message ID. Previously, notmuch would always hide these
493 duplicate files, (returning a single, arbitrary filename with
494 notmuch_message_get_filename).
496 With this release, library users can access all filenames for a
497 message with the new function:
499 notmuch_message_get_filenames
501 Together with notmuch_filenames_valid, notmuch_filenames_get, and
502 notmuch_filenames_move_to_next it is now possible to iterate over
503 all available filenames for a given message.
505 New command-line features
506 -------------------------
507 New "notmuch show --format=raw" for getting at original email contents
509 This new feature allows for a fully-functional email client to be
510 built on top of the notmuch command-line without needing any direct
511 access to the mail store itself.
513 For example, it's now possible to run "emacs -f notmuch" on a local
514 machine with only ssh access to the mail store/notmuch database. To
515 do this, simply set the notmuch-command variable in emacs to the
516 name of a script containing:
518 ssh user@host notmuch "$@"
520 If the ssh client has enabled connection sharing (ControlMaster
521 option in OpenSSH), the emacs interface can be quite responsive this
526 Fix "notmuch search" to print nothing when nothing matches
528 The 0.4 release had a bug in which:
530 notmuch search <expression-with-no-matches>
532 would produce a single blank line of output, (where previous
533 versions would produce no output. This fix also causes a change in
534 the --format=json output, (which would previously produce "[]" and
535 now produces nothing).
537 Emacs interface improvements
538 ----------------------------
539 Fix to allow pipe ('|') command to work when using notmuch over ssh
541 Fix count of lines in hidden signatures.
543 Omit repeated subject lines in (collapsed) thread display.
545 Display current thread subject in a header line.
547 Provide a "c i" binding to copy a thread ID from the search view.
549 Allow for notmuch-fcc-dirs to have a value of nil.
551 Also, the more complex form of notmuch-fcc-dirs now has a slightly
552 different format. It no longer has a special first-element, fallback
553 string. Instead it's now a list of cons cells where the car of each
554 cell is a regular expression to be matched against the sender
555 address, and the cdr is the name of a folder to use for an FCC. So
556 the old fallback behavior can be achieved by including a final cell
557 of (".*" . "default-fcc-folder").
559 Vim interface improvements
560 --------------------------
561 Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface.
563 These include optimizations, support for newer versions of vim, fixed
564 support for sending mail on modern systems, new commands, and
569 Added initial ruby bindings in bindings/ruby
571 Notmuch 0.4 (2010-11-01)
572 ========================
573 New command-line features
574 -------------------------
575 notmuch search --output=(summary|threads|messages|tags|files)
577 This new option allows for particular items to be returned from
578 notmuch searches. The "summary" option is the default and behaves
579 just as "notmuch search" has historically behaved.
581 The new option values allow for thread IDs, message IDs, lists of
582 tags, and lists of filenames to be returned from searches. It is
583 expected that this new option will be very useful in shell
584 scripts. For example:
586 for file in $(notmuch search --output=files <search-terms>); do
587 <operations-on> "$file"
590 notmuch show --format=mbox <search-specification>
592 This new option allows for the messages matching a search
593 specification to be presented as an mbox. Specifically the "mboxrd"
594 format is used which allows for reversible quoting of lines
595 beginning with "From ". A reader should remove a single '>' from the
596 beginning of all lines beginning with one or more '>' characters
597 followed by the 5 characters "From ".
599 notmuch config [get|set] <section>.<item> [value ...]
601 The new top-level "config" command allows for any value in the
602 notmuch configuration file to be queried or set to a new value. Both
603 single-valued and multi-valued items are supported, as our any
604 custom items stored in the configuration file.
606 Avoid setting Bcc header in "notmuch reply"
608 We decided that this was a bit heavy-handed as the actual mail
609 user-agent should be responsible for setting any Bcc option. Also,
610 see below for the notmuch/emacs user-agent now setting an Fcc by
611 default rather than Bcc.
615 Add notmuch_query_get_query_string and notmuch_query_get_sort
617 These are simply functions for querying properties of a
618 notmuch_query_t object.
622 Enable Fcc of all sent messages by default (to "sent" directory)
624 All messages sent from the emacs interface will now be saved to the
625 notmuch mail store where they will be incorporated to the database
626 by the next "notmuch new". By default, messages are saved to the
627 "sent" directory at the top-level of the mail store. This directory
628 can be customized by means of the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" option in the
629 notmuch customize interface.
631 Ability to all open messages in a thread to a pipe
633 Historically, the '|' keybinding allows for piping a single message
634 to an external command. Now, by prefixing this key with a prefix
635 argument, (for example, by pressing "Control-U |"), all open
636 messages in the current thread will be sent to the external command.
638 Optional support for detecting inline patches
640 This hook is disabled by default but can be enabled with a checkbox
641 under "Notmuch Show Insert Text/Plain Hook" in the notmuch customize
642 interface. It allows for inline patches to be detected and treated
643 as if they were attachments, (with context-sensitive highlighting).
645 Automatically tag messages as "replied" when sending a reply
647 Messages replied to within the emacs interface will now be tagged as
648 "replied". This feature can easily be customized to add or remove
649 other tags as well. For example, a user might use a tag of
650 "needs-reply" and can configure this feature to automatically remove
651 that tag when replying. See "Notmuch Message Mark Replied" in the
652 notmuch customize interface.
654 Allow search-result color specifications to overlay each other
656 For example, one tag can specify the background color of matching
657 lines, while another can specify the foreground. With this change,
658 both settings will now be visible simultaneously, (which was not the
659 case in previous releases). See "Notmuch Search Line Faces" in the
660 notmuch customize interface.
662 Make hidden author names still available for incremental search.
664 When there is insufficient space to display all authors of a thread
665 in search results, the names of hidden authors are now still made
666 available to emacs' incremental search commands. As the user
667 searches, matching lines will temporarily expand to show the hidden
670 New binding of Control-TAB (works like TAB in reverse)
672 Many notmuch nodes already use TAB to navigate forward through
673 various items allowing actions, (message headers, email attachments,
674 etc.). The new Control-TAB binding operates similarly but in the
677 New build-system features
678 -------------------------
679 Various portability fixes have been applied
681 These include fixes for build failures on at least Solaris, FreeBSD,
682 and Fedora systems. We're hopeful that the notmuch code base is now
683 more portable than ever before.
685 Arrange for libnotmuch to be found automatically after make install
687 The notmuch build system is now careful to help the user avoid
688 errors of the form "libnotmuch.so could not be found" immediately
689 after installing. This support takes two forms:
691 1. If the library is installed to a system directory,
692 (configured in /etc/ld.so.conf), then "make install" will
693 automatically run ldconfig.
695 2. If the library is installed to a non-system directory, the
696 build system adds a DR_RUNPATH entry to the final binary
697 pointing to the directory to which the library is installed.
699 When this support works, the user should be able to run notmuch
700 immediately after "make install", without any errors trying to find
701 the notmuch library, and without having to manually set environment
702 variables such as LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
704 Check compiler/linker options before using them
706 The configure script now carefully checks that any desired
707 compilation options, (whether for enabling compiler warnings, or for
708 embedding rpath, etc.), are supported. Only supported options are
709 used in the resulting Makefile.
711 New test-suite features
712 -----------------------
713 New modularization of test suite.
715 Thanks to a gracious relicensing of the test-suite infrastructure
716 from the git project, notmuch now has a modular test suite. This
717 provides the ability to run individual sections of the test suite
718 rather than the whole things. It also provides better summary of
719 test results, with support for tests that are expected to fail
720 (BROKEN and FIXED) in addition to PASS and FAIL. Finally, it makes
721 it easy to run the test suite within valgrind (pass --valgrind to
722 notmuch-test or to any sub-script) which has been very useful.
724 New testing of emacs interface.
726 The test suite has been augmented to allow automated testing of the
727 emacs interfaces. So far, this includes basic searches, display of
728 threads, and tag manipulation. This also includes a test that a new
729 message can successfully be sent out through a (dummy) SMTP server
730 and that said message is successfully integrated into the notmuch
731 database via the FCC setting.
735 Fix potential corruption of database when "notmuch new " is interrupted.
737 Previously, an interruption of "notmuch new" would (rarely) result
738 in a corrupt database. The corruption would manifest itself by a
739 persistent error of the form:
741 document ID of 1234 has no thread ID
743 The message-adding code has been carefully audited and reworked to
744 avoid this sort of corruption regardless of when it is interrupted.
746 Fix failure with extremely long message ID headers.
748 Previously, a message with an extremely long message ID, (say, more
749 than 300 characters), would fail to be added to notmuch, (triggering
750 Xapian exceptions). This has now been fixed.
752 Fix for messages with "charset=unknown-8bit"
754 Previously, messages with this charset would cause notmuch to emit a
755 GMime warning, (which would then trip up emacs or other interfaces
756 parsing the notmuch results).
758 Fix notmuch_query_search_threads function to return NULL on any exception
760 Fix "notmuch search" to return non-zero if notmuch_query_search_threads fails
762 Previously, this command could confusingly report a Xapian
763 exception, yet still return an error code of 0. It now correctly
764 returns a failing error code of 1 in this case.
768 Fix to handle a message with a subject containing, for example "[1234]"
770 Previously, a message subject containing a sequence of digits within
771 square brackets would cause the emacs interface to mis-parse the
772 output of "notmuch search". This would result in the message being
773 mis-displayed and prevent the user from manipulating the message in
776 Fix to correctly handle message IDs containing ".."
778 The emacs interface now properly quotes message IDs to avoid a
779 Xapian bug in which the ".." within a message ID would be
780 misinterpreted as a numeric range specification.
784 The python bindings for notmuch have been updated to work with python3.
786 Debian-specific fixes
787 ---------------------
788 Fix emacs initialization so "M-x notmuch" works for users by default.
790 Now, a new Debian user can immediately run "emacs -f notmuch" after
791 "apt-get install notmuch". Previously, the user would have had to
792 edit the ~/.emacs file to add "(require 'notmuch)" before this would
795 Notmuch 0.3.1 (2010-04-27)
796 ==========================
799 Fix an infinite loop in "notmuch reply"
801 This bug could be triggered by replying to a message where the
802 user's primary email address did not appear in the To: header and
803 the user had not configured any secondary email addresses. The bug
804 was a simple re-use of the same iterator variable in nested loops.
806 Fix a potential SEGV in "notmuch search"
808 This bug could be triggered by an author name ending in a ','.
809 Admittedly - that's almost certainly a spam email, but we never
810 want notmuch to crash.
814 Fix calculations for line wrapping in the primary "notmuch" view.
816 Fix Fcc support to prompt to create a directory if the specified Fcc
817 directory does not exist.
821 Fix build on OpenSolaris (at least) due to missing 'extern "C"' block.
823 Without this, the C++ sources could not find strcasestr and the
824 final linking of notmuch would fail.
826 Notmuch 0.3 (2010-04-27)
827 ========================
828 New command-line features
829 -------------------------
830 User-configurable tags for new messages
832 A new "new.tags" option is available in the configuration file to
833 determine which tags are applied to new messages. Run "notmuch
834 setup" to generate new documentation within ~/.notmuch-config on how
835 to specify this value.
837 Threads search results named based on subjects that match search
839 This means that when new mails arrived to a thread you've previously
840 read, and the new mails have a new subject, you will see that
841 subject in the search results rather than the old subject.
843 Faster operation of "notmuch tag" (avoid unneeded sorting)
845 Since the user just wants to tag all matching messages, we can make
846 things perform a bit faster by avoiding the sort.
848 Even Better guessing of From: header for "notmuch reply"
850 Notmuch now looks at a number of headers when trying to figure out
851 the best From: header to use in a reply. This is helpful if you have
852 several configured email addresses, and you also subscribe to various
853 mailing lists with different addresses, (so that mails you are
854 replying to won't always include your subscribed address in the To:
857 Indication of author names that match a search
859 When notmuch displays threads as the result of a search, it now
860 lists the authors that match the search before listing the other
861 authors in the thread. It inserts a pipe '|' symbol between the last
862 matching and first non-matching author. This is especially useful in
863 a search that includes tag:unread. Now the authors of the unread
864 messages in the thread are listed first.
868 Sebastian Spaeth has contributed his python bindings for the notmuch
869 library to the central repository. These bindings were previously
870 known as "cnotmuch" within python but have now been renamed to be
871 accessible with a simple, and more official-looking "import notmuch".
873 The bindings have already proven very useful as people proficient in
874 python have been able to easily develop programs to do notmuch-based
875 searches for email-address completion, maildir-flag synchronization,
878 These bindings are available within the bindings/python directory, but
879 are not yet integrated into the top-level Makefiles, nor the top-level
880 package-building scripts. Improvements are welcome.
882 Emacs interface improvements
883 ----------------------------
884 An entirely new initial view for notmuch, (friendly yet powerful)
886 Some of us call the new view "notmuch hello" but you can get at it
887 by simply calling "emacs -f notmuch". The new view provides a search
888 bar where new searches can be performed. It also displays a list of
889 recent searches, along with a button to save any of these, giving it
890 a new name as a "saved search". Many people find these "saved
891 searches" one of the most convenient ways of organizing their mail,
892 (providing all of the features of "folders" in other mail clients,
893 but without any of the disadvantages).
895 Finally, this view can also optionally display all of the tags that
896 exist in the database, along with a count for each tag, and a custom
897 search of messages with that tag that's simply a click (or keypress)
900 Note: For users that liked the original mode of "emacs -f notmuch"
901 immediately displaying a particular search result, we
902 recommend instead running something like:
904 emacs --eval '(notmuch search "tag:inbox" t)'
906 The "t" means to sort the messages in an "oldest first" order,
907 (as notmuch would do previously by default). You can also
908 leave that off to have your search results in "newest first"
911 Full-featured "customize" support for configuring notmuch
913 Notmuch now plugs in well to the emacs "customize" mode to make it
914 much simpler to find things about the notmuch interface that can be
917 You can get to this mode by starting at the main "Customize" menu in
918 emacs, then browsing through "Applications", "Mail", and
919 "Notmuch". Or you can go straight to "M-x customize-group"
922 Once you're at the customize screen, you'll see a list of documented
923 options that can be manipulated along with checkboxes, drop-down
924 selectors, and text-entry boxes for configuring the various
927 Support for doing tab-completion of email addresses
929 This support currently relies on an external program,
930 (notmuch-addresses), that is not yet shipped with notmuch
931 itself. But multiple, suitable implementations of this program have
932 already been written that generate address completions by doing
933 notmuch searches of your email collection. For example, providing
934 first those addresses that you have composed messages to in the
937 One such program (implemented in python with the python bindings to
938 notmuch) is available via:
940 git clone http://jkr.acm.jhu.edu/git/notmuch_addresses.git
942 Install that program as notmuch-addresses on your PATH, and then
943 hitting TAB on a partial email address or name within the To: or Cc:
944 line of an email message will provide matching completions.
946 Support for file-based (Fcc) delivery of sent messages to mail store
948 This isn't yet enabled by default. To enable this, one will have to
949 set the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" setting within the notmuch customize
950 screen, (see its documentation there for details). We anticipate
951 making this automatic in a future release.
953 New 'G' key binding to trigger mail refresh (G == "Get new mail")
955 The 'G' key works wherever '=' works. Before refreshing the screen
956 it calls an external program that can be used to poll email servers,
957 run notmuch new and setup specific tags for the new emails. The
958 script to be called should be configured with the "Notmuch Poll
959 Script" setting in the customize interface. This script will
960 typically invoke "notmuch new" and then perhaps several "notmuch
963 Implement emacs message display with the JSON output from notmuch.
965 This is much more robust than the previous implementation, (where
966 some HTML mails and mail quoting the notmuch code with the delimiter
967 characters in it would cause the parser to fall over).
969 Better handling of HTML messages and MIME attachments (inline images!)
971 Allow for any MIME parts that emacs can display to be displayed
972 inline. This includes inline viewing of image attachments, (provided
973 the window is large enough to fit the image at its natural size).
975 Much more robust handling of HTML messages. Currently both text/plain
976 and text/html alternates will be rendered next to each other. In a
977 future release, users will be able to decide to see only one or the
978 other representation.
980 Each attachment now has its own button so that attachments can be
981 saved individually (the 'w' key is still available to save all
984 Customizable support for tidying of text/plain message content
986 Many new functions are available for tidying up message
987 content. These include options such as wrapping long lines,
988 compressing duplicate blank lines, etc.
990 Most of these are disabled by default, but can easily be enabled by
991 clicking the available check boxes under the "Notmuch Show Insert
992 Text/Plain Hook" within the notmuch customize screen.
994 New support for searchable citations (even when hidden)
996 When portions of overly-long citations are hidden, the contents of
997 these citations will still be available for emacs' standard
998 "incremental search" functions. When the search matches any portion
999 of a hidden citation, the citation will become visible temporarily
1000 to display the search result.
1002 More flexible handling of header visibility
1004 As an answer to complaints from many users, the To, Cc, and Date
1005 headers of messages are no longer hidden by default. For those users
1006 that liked that these were hidden, a new "Notmuch Messages Headers
1007 Visible" option in the customize interface can be set to nil. The
1008 visibility of headers can still be toggled on a per-message basis
1009 with the 'h' keybinding.
1011 For users that don't want to see some subset of those headers, the
1012 new "Notmuch Message Headers" variable can be customized to list
1013 only those headers that should be present in the display of a message.
1015 The Return key now toggles message visibility anywhere
1017 Previously this worked only on the first summary-line of a message.
1019 Customizable formatting of search results
1021 The user can easily customize the order, width, and formatting of
1022 the various fields in a "notmuch search" buffer. See the "Notmuch
1023 Search Result Format" section of the customize interface.
1025 Generate nicer names for search buffers when using a saved search.
1027 Add a notmuch User-Agent header when sending mail from notmuch/emacs.
1029 New keybinding (M-Ret) to open all collapsed messages in a thread.
1033 Provide a new NOTMUCH_SORT_UNSORTED value for queries
1035 This can be somewhat faster when sorting simply isn't desired. For
1036 example when collecting a set of messages that will all be
1037 manipulated identically, (adding a tag, removing a tag, deleting the
1038 messages), then there's no advantage to sorting the messages by
1043 Fix to compile against GMime 2.6
1045 Previously notmuch insisted on being able to find GMime 2.4, (even
1046 though GMime 2.6 would have worked all along).
1048 Fix configure script to accept (and ignore) various standard options.
1050 For example, those that the Gentoo build scripts expect configure to
1051 accept are now all accepted.
1055 A large number of new tests for the many new features.
1057 Better display of output from failed tests.
1059 Now shows failures with diff rather than forcing the user to gaze at
1060 complete actual and expected output looking for deviation.
1062 Notmuch 0.2 (2010-04-16)
1063 ========================
1064 This is the second release of the notmuch mail system, with actual
1065 detailed release notes this time!
1067 This release consists of a number of minor new features that make
1068 notmuch more pleasant to use, and a few fairly major bug fixes.
1070 We didn't quite hit our release target of "about a week" from the 0.1
1071 release, (0.2 is happening 11 days after 0.1), but we hope to do
1072 better for next week. Look forward to some major features coming to
1073 notmuch in subsequent releases.
1079 Better guessing of From: header.
1081 Notmuch now tries harder to guess which configured address should be
1082 used as the From: line in a "notmuch reply". It will examine the
1083 Received: headers if it fails to find any configured address in To:
1084 or Cc:. This allows it to often choose the correct address even when
1085 replying to a message sent to a mailing list, and not directly to a
1088 Make "notmuch count" with no arguments count all messages
1090 Previously, it was hard to construct a search term that was
1091 guaranteed to match all messages.
1093 Provide a new special-case search term of "*" to match all messages.
1095 This can be used in any command accepting a search term, such as
1096 "notmuch search '*'". Note that you'll want to take care that the
1097 shell doesn't expand * against the current files. And note that the
1098 support for "*" is a special case. It's only meaningful as a single
1099 search term and loses its special meaning when combined with any
1102 Automatically detect thread connections even when a parent message is
1105 Previously, if two or more message were received with a common
1106 parent, but that parent was not received, then these messages would
1107 not be recognized as belonging to the same thread. This is now fixed
1108 so that such messages are properly connected in a thread.
1112 Fix potential data loss in "notmuch new" with SIGINT
1114 One code path in "notmuch new" was not properly handling
1115 SIGINT. Previously, this could lead to messages being removed from
1116 the database (and their tags being lost) if the user pressed
1117 Control-C while "notmuch new" was working.
1119 Fix segfault when a message includes a MIME part that is empty.
1121 Fix handling of non-ASCII characters with --format=json
1123 Previously, characters outside the range of 7-bit ASCII were
1124 silently dropped from the JSON output. This led to corrupted display
1125 of utf-8 content in the upcoming notmuch web-based frontends.
1127 Fix headers to be properly decoded in "notmuch reply"
1129 Previously, the user might see:
1131 Subject: Re: =?iso-8859-2?q?Rozlu=E8ka?=
1135 Subject: Re: Rozlučka
1137 The former text is properly encoded to be RFC-compliant SMTP, will
1138 be sent correctly, and will be properly decoded by the
1139 recipient. But the user trying to edit the reply would likely be
1140 unable to read or edit that field in its encoded form.
1142 Emacs client features
1143 ---------------------
1144 Show the last few lines of citations as well as the first few lines.
1146 It's often the case that the last sentence of a citation is what is
1147 being replied to directly, so the last few lines are often much more
1148 important. The number of lines shown at the beginning and end of any
1149 citation can be configured, (notmuch-show-citation-lines-prefix and
1150 notmuch-show-citation-lines-suffix).
1152 The '+' and '-' commands in the search view can now add and remove
1155 Selective bulk tagging is now possible by selecting a region of
1156 threads and then using either the '+' or '-' keybindings. Bulk
1157 tagging is still available for all threads matching the current
1158 search with the '*' binding.
1160 More meaningful buffer names for thread-view buffers.
1162 Notmuch now uses the Subject of the thread as the buffer
1163 name. Previously it was using the thread ID, which is a meaningless
1166 Provide for customized colors of threads in search view based on tags.
1168 See the documentation of notmuch-search-line-faces, (or us "M-x
1169 customize" and browse to the "notmuch" group within "Applications"
1170 and "Mail"), for details on how to configure this colorization.
1172 Build-system features
1173 ---------------------
1174 Add support to properly build libnotmuch on Darwin systems (OS X).
1176 Add support to configure for many standard options.
1178 We include actual support for:
1180 --includedir --mandir --sysconfdir
1182 And accept and silently ignore several more:
1184 --build --infodir --libexecdir --localstatedir
1185 --disable-maintainer-mode --disable-dependency-tracking
1187 Install emacs client in "make install" rather than requiring a
1188 separate "make install-emacs".
1190 Automatically compute versions numbers between releases.
1192 This support uses the git-describe notation, so a version such as
1193 0.1-144-g43cbbfc indicates a version that is 144 commits since the
1194 0.1 release and is available as git commit "43cbbfc".
1196 Add a new "make test" target to run the test suite and actually verify
1199 Notmuch 0.1 (2010-04-05)
1200 ========================
1201 This is the first release of the notmuch mail system.
1203 It includes the libnotmuch library, the notmuch command-line
1204 interface, and an emacs-based interface to notmuch.
1206 Note: Notmuch will work best with Xapian 1.0.18 (or later) or Xapian
1207 1.1.4 (or later). Previous versions of Xapian (whether 1.0 or 1.1) had
1208 a performance bug that made notmuch very slow when modifying
1209 tags. This would cause distracting pauses when reading mail while
1210 notmuch would wait for Xapian when removing the "inbox" and "unread"
1211 tags from messages in a thread.