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 Add a new, optional hook for detecting inline patches
23 This hook is disabled by default but can be enabled with a checkbox
24 under ""Notmuch Show Insert Text/Plain Hook" in the notmuch
25 customize interface. It allows for inline patches to be detected and
26 treated as if they were attachments, (with context-sensitive
29 Automatically tag messages as "replied" when sending a reply
31 This feature adds a "replied" tag by default, but can easily be
32 customized to add or remove other tags as well. For example, a user
33 might use a tag of "needs-reply" and can configure this feature to
34 automatically remove that tag when replying. See "Notmuch Message
35 Mark Replied" in the notmuch customize interface.
37 Notmuch 0.3 (2010-04-27)
38 ========================
39 New command-line features
40 -------------------------
41 User-configurable tags for new messages
43 A new "new.tags" option is available in the configuration file to
44 determine which tags are applied to new messages. Run "notmuch
45 setup" to generate new documentation within ~/.notmuch-config on how
46 to specify this value.
48 Threads search results named based on subjects that match search
50 This means that when new mails arrived to a thread you've previously
51 read, and the new mails have a new subject, you will see that
52 subject in the search results rather than the old subject.
54 Faster operation of "notmuch tag" (avoid unneeded sorting)
56 Since the user just wants to tag all matching messages, we can make
57 things perform a bit faster by avoiding the sort.
59 Even Better guessing of From: header for "notmuch reply"
61 Notmuch now looks at a number of headers when trying to figure out
62 the best From: header to use in a reply. This is helpful if you have
63 several configured email addresses, and you also subscribe to various
64 mailing lists with different addresses, (so that mails you are
65 replying to won't always include your subscribed address in the To:
68 Indication of author names that match a search
70 When notmuch displays threads as the result of a search, it now
71 lists the authors that match the search before listing the other
72 authors in the thread. It inserts a pipe '|' symbol between the last
73 matching and first non-matching author. This is especially useful in
74 a search that includes tag:unread. Now the authors of the unread
75 messages in the thread are listed first.
79 Sebastian Spaeth has contributed his python bindings for the notmuch
80 library to the central repository. These bindings were previously
81 known as "cnotmuch" within python but have now been renamed to be
82 accessible with a simple, and more official-looking "import notmuch".
84 The bindings have already proven very useful as people proficient in
85 python have been able to easily develop programs to do notmuch-based
86 searches for email-address completion, maildir-flag synchronization,
89 These bindings are available within the bindings/python directory, but
90 are not yet integrated into the top-level Makefiles, nor the top-level
91 package-building scripts. Improvements are welcome.
93 Emacs interface improvements
94 ----------------------------
95 An entirely new initial view for notmuch, (friendly yet powerful)
97 Some of us call the new view "notmuch hello" but you can get at it
98 by simply calling "emacs -f notmuch". The new view provides a search
99 bar where new searches can be performed. It also displays a list of
100 recent searches, along with a button to save any of these, giving it
101 a new name as a "saved search". Many people find these "saved
102 searches" one of the most convenient ways of organizing their mail,
103 (providing all of the features of "folders" in other mail clients,
104 but without any of the disadvantages).
106 Finally, this view can also optionally display all of the tags that
107 exist in the database, along with a count for each tag, and a custom
108 search of messages with that tag that's simply a click (or keypress)
111 Note: For users that liked the original mode of "emacs -f notmuch"
112 immediately displaying a particular search result, we
113 recommend instead running something like:
115 emacs --eval '(notmuch search "tag:inbox" t)'
117 The "t" means to sort the messages in an "oldest first" order,
118 (as notmuch would do previously by default). You can also
119 leave that off to have your search results in "newest first"
122 Full-featured "customize" support for configuring notmuch
124 Notmuch now plugs in well to the emacs "customize" mode to make it
125 much simpler to find things about the notmuch interface that can be
128 You can get to this mode by starting at the main "Customize" menu in
129 emacs, then browsing through "Applications", "Mail", and
130 "Notmuch". Or you can go straight to "M-x customize-group"
133 Once you're at the customize screen, you'll see a list of documented
134 options that can be manipulated along with checkboxes, drop-down
135 selectors, and text-entry boxes for configuring the various
138 Support for doing tab-completion of email addresses
140 This support currently relies on an external program,
141 (notmuch-addresses), that is not yet shipped with notmuch
142 itself. But multiple, suitable implementations of this program have
143 already been written that generate address completions by doing
144 notmuch searches of your email collection. For example, providing
145 first those addresses that you have composed messages to in the
148 One such program (implemented in python with the python bindings to
149 notmuch) is available via:
151 git clone http://jkr.acm.jhu.edu/git/notmuch_addresses.git
153 Install that program as notmuch-addresses on your PATH, and then
154 hitting TAB on a partial email address or name within the To: or Cc:
155 line of an email message will provide matching completions.
157 Support for file-based (Fcc) delivery of sent messages to mail store
159 This isn't yet enabled by default. To enable this, one will have to
160 set the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" setting within the notmuch customize
161 screen, (see its documentation there for details). We anticipate
162 making this automatic in a future release.
164 New 'G' key binding to trigger mail refresh (G == "Get new mail")
166 The 'G' key works wherever '=' works. Before refreshing the screen
167 it calls an external program that can be used to poll email servers,
168 run notmuch new and setup specific tags for the new emails. The
169 script to be called should be configured with the "Notmuch Poll
170 Script" setting in the customize interface. This script will
171 typically invoke "notmuch new" and then perhaps several "notmuch
174 Implement emacs message display with the JSON output from notmuch.
176 This is much more robust than the previous implementation, (where
177 some HTML mails and mail quoting the notmuch code with the delimiter
178 characters in it would cause the parser to fall over).
180 Better handling of HTML messages and MIME attachments (inline images!)
182 Allow for any MIME parts that emacs can display to be displayed
183 inline. This includes inline viewing of image attachments, (provided
184 the window is large enough to fit the image at its natural size).
186 Much more robust handling of HTML messages. Currently both text/plain
187 and text/html alternates will be rendered next to each other. In a
188 future release, users will be able to decide to see only one or the
189 other representation.
191 Each attachment now has its own button so that attachments can be
192 saved individually (the 'w' key is still available to save all
195 Customizable support for tidying of text/plain message content
197 Many new functions are available for tidying up message
198 content. These include options such as wrapping long lines,
199 compressing duplicate blank lines, etc.
201 Most of these are disabled by default, but can easily be enabled by
202 clicking the available check boxes under the "Notmuch Show Insert
203 Text/Plain Hook" within the notmuch customize screen.
205 New support for searchable citations (even when hidden)
207 When portions of overly-long citations are hidden, the contents of
208 these citations will still be available for emacs' standard
209 "incremental search" functions. When the search matches any portion
210 of a hidden citation, the citation will become visible temporarily
211 to display the search result.
213 More flexible handling of header visibility
215 As an answer to complaints from many users, the To, Cc, and Date
216 headers of messages are no longer hidden by default. For those users
217 that liked that these were hidden, a new "Notmuch Messages Headers
218 Visible" option in the customize interface can be set to nil. The
219 visibility of headers can still be toggled on a per-message basis
220 with the 'h' keybinding.
222 For users that don't want to see some subset of those headers, the
223 new "Notmuch Message Headers" variable can be customized to list
224 only those headers that should be present in the display of a message.
226 The Return key now toggles message visibility anywhere
228 Previously this worked only on the first summary-line of a message.
230 Customizable formatting of search results
232 The user can easily customize the order, width, and formatting of
233 the various fields in a "notmuch search" buffer. See the "Notmuch
234 Search Result Format" section of the customize interface.
236 Generate nicer names for search buffers when using a saved search.
238 Add a notmuch User-Agent header when sending mail from notmuch/emacs.
240 New keybinding (M-Ret) to open all collapsed messages in a thread.
244 Provide a new NOTMUCH_SORT_UNSORTED value for queries
246 This can be somewhat faster when sorting simply isn't desired. For
247 example when collecting a set of messages that will all be
248 manipulated identically, (adding a tag, removing a tag, deleting the
249 messages), then there's no advantage to sorting the messages by
254 Fix to compile against GMime 2.6
256 Previously notmuch insisted on being able to find GMime 2.4, (even
257 though GMime 2.6 would have worked all along).
259 Fix configure script to accept (and ignore) various standard options.
261 For example, those that the gentoo build scripts expect configure to
262 accept are now all accepted.
266 A large number of new tests for the many new features.
268 Better display of output from failed tests.
270 Now shows failures with diff rather than forcing the user to gaze at
271 complete actual and expected output looking for deviation.
273 Notmuch 0.2 (2010-04-16)
274 ========================
275 This is the second release of the notmuch mail system, with actual
276 detailed release notes this time!
278 This release consists of a number of minor new features that make
279 notmuch more pleasant to use, and a few fairly major bug fixes.
281 We didn't quite hit our release target of "about a week" from the 0.1
282 release, (0.2 is happening 11 days after 0.1), but we hope to do
283 better for next week. Look forward to some major features coming to
284 notmuch in subsequent releases.
290 Better guessing of From: header.
292 Notmuch now tries harder to guess which configured address should be
293 used as the From: line in a "notmuch reply". It will examine the
294 Received: headers if it fails to find any configured address in To:
295 or Cc:. This allows it to often choose the correct address even when
296 replying to a message sent to a mailing list, and not directly to a
299 Make "notmuch count" with no arguments count all messages
301 Previously, it was hard to construct a search term that was
302 guaranteed to match all messages.
304 Provide a new special-case search term of "*" to match all messages.
306 This can be used in any command accepting a search term, such as
307 "notmuch search '*'". Note that you'll want to take care that the
308 shell doesn't expand * against the current files. And note that the
309 support for "*" is a special case. It's only meaningful as a single
310 search term and loses its special meaning when combined with any
313 Automatically detect thread connections even when a parent message is
316 Previously, if two or more message were received with a common
317 parent, but that parent was not received, then these messages would
318 not be recognized as belonging to the same thread. This is now fixed
319 so that such messages are properly connected in a thread.
323 Fix potential data loss in "notmuch new" with SIGINT
325 One code path in "notmuch new" was not properly handling
326 SIGINT. Previously, this could lead to messages being removed from
327 the database (and their tags being lost) if the user pressed
328 Control-C while "notmuch new" was working.
330 Fix segfault when a message includes a MIME part that is empty.
332 Fix handling of non-ASCII characters with --format=json
334 Previously, characters outside the range of 7-bit ASCII were
335 silently dropped from the JSON output. This led to corrupted display
336 of utf-8 content in the upcoming notmuch web-based frontends.
338 Fix headers to be properly decoded in "notmuch reply"
340 Previously, the user might see:
342 Subject: Re: =?iso-8859-2?q?Rozlu=E8ka?=
346 Subject: Re: Rozlučka
348 The former text is properly encoded to be RFC-compliant SMTP, will
349 be sent correctly, and will be properly decoded by the
350 recipient. But the user trying to edit the reply would likely be
351 unable to read or edit that field in its encoded form.
353 Emacs client features
354 ---------------------
355 Show the last few lines of citations as well as the first few lines.
357 It's often the case that the last sentence of a citation is what is
358 being replied to directly, so the last few lines are often much more
359 important. The number of lines shown at the beginning and end of any
360 citation can be configured, (notmuch-show-citation-lines-prefix and
361 notmuch-show-citation-lines-suffix).
363 The '+' and '-' commands in the search view can now add and remove
366 Selective bulk tagging is now possible by selecting a region of
367 threads and then using either the '+' or '-' keybindings. Bulk
368 tagging is still available for all threads matching the current
369 search with th '*' binding.
371 More meaningful buffer names for thread-view buffers.
373 Notmuch now uses the Subject of the thread as the buffer
374 name. Previously it was using the thread ID, which is a meaningless
377 Provide for customized colors of threads in search view based on tags.
379 See the documentation of notmuch-search-line-faces, (or us "M-x
380 customize" and browse to the "notmuch" group within "Applications"
381 and "Mail"), for details on how to configure this colorization.
383 Build-system features
384 ---------------------
385 Add support to properly build libnotmuch on Darwin systems (OS X).
387 Add support to configure for many standard options.
389 We include actual support for:
391 --includedir --mandir --sysconfdir
393 And accept and silently ignore several more:
395 --build --infodir --libexecdir --localstatedir
396 --disable-maintainer-mode --disable-dependency-tracking
398 Install emacs client in "make install" rather than requiring a
399 separate "make install-emacs".
401 Automatically compute versions numbers between releases.
403 This support uses the git-describe notation, so a version such as
404 0.1-144-g43cbbfc indicates a version that is 144 commits since the
405 0.1 release and is available as git commit "43cbbfc".
407 Add a new "make test" target to run the test suite and actually verify
410 Notmuch 0.1 (2010-04-05)
411 ========================
412 This is the first release of the notmuch mail system.
414 It includes the libnotmuch library, the notmuch command-line
415 interface, and an emacs-based interface to notmuch.
417 Note: Notmuch will work best with Xapian 1.0.18 (or later) or Xapian
418 1.1.4 (or later). Previous versions of Xapian (whether 1.0 or 1.1) had
419 a performance bug that made notmuch very slow when modifying
420 tags. This would cause distracting pauses when reading mail while
421 notmuch would wait for Xapian when removing the "inbox" and "unread"
422 tags from messages in a thread.