1 Notmuch 0.7 (2011-08-01)
2 ========================
4 Vim interface improvements
5 --------------------------
7 Jason Woofenden provided a number of bug fixes for the Vim interface
9 * fix citation/signature fold lengths
10 * fix cig/cit parsing within multipart/*
11 * fix on-screen instructions for show-signature
12 * fix from list reformatting in search view
13 * fix space key: now archives (did opposite)
15 Uwe Kleine-König contributed
17 * use full path for sendmail/doc fix
18 * fix compose temp file name
20 Python Bindings changes
21 -----------------------
23 Sebastian Spaeth contributed two changes related to unicode and UTF8:
25 * message tags are now explicitly unicode
26 * query string is encoded as a UTF8 byte string
28 Build-System improvments
29 ------------------------
31 Generate notmuch.sym after the relevant object files
33 This fixes a bug in parallel building. Thanks to Thomas Jost for the
36 Notmuch 0.6.1 (2011-07-17)
37 ==========================
42 Re-export Xapian exception typeinfo symbols.
44 It turned out our aggressive symbol hiding caused problems for
45 people running gcc 4.4.5.
47 Notmuch 0.6 (2011-07-01)
48 =======================
51 Folder-based searching
53 Notmuch queries can now include a search term to match the
54 directories in which mail files are stored (within the mail
55 storage). The syntax is as follows:
59 For example, one might use things such as:
65 to match any path containing a directory "spam", "work/todo", or
66 containing a directory starting with "2011-", respectively.
68 This feature is particularly useful for users of delivery-agent
69 software (such as procmail or maildrop) that is filtering mail and
70 delivering it to particular folders, or users of systems such as
71 Gmail that use filesystem directories to indicate message tags.
73 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
74 notmuch will be searchable with folder: terms. In order to enable
75 this feature for all mail, the entire notmuch index will need to be
78 notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
79 # Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
81 notmuch restore notmuch.dump
85 Both the command line interface and the emacs-interface have new
86 support for PGP/MIME, detailed below. Thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor
87 and Jameson Graef Rollins for making this happen.
89 New, automatic tags: "signed" and "encrypted"
91 These tags will automatically be applied to messages containing
92 multipart/signed and multipart/encrypted parts.
94 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
95 notmuch will receive these tags.
97 New command-line features
98 -------------------------
99 Add new "notmuch show --verify" option for signature verification
101 This option instruct notmuch to verify the signature of
102 PGP/MIME-signed parts.
104 Add new "notmuch show --decrypt" and "notmuch reply --decrypt" options
106 This option instructs notmuch to decrypt PGP/MIME-encrypted parts.
107 Note that this feature currently requires gpg-agent and a passphrase entry
108 tool (e.g. pinentry-gtk or pinentry-curses).
110 Proper nesting of multipart parts in "notmuch show" output
112 MIME parts are now display with proper nesting to reflect original
113 MIME hierarchy of a message. This allows clients to correctly
114 analyze the MIME structure, (such as, for example, determining to
115 which parts a signature part applies).
117 Add new "notmuch show --part" option
119 This is a replacement for the older "notmuch part" command, (which
120 is now deprecated—it should still work as always, but is no longer
121 documented). Putting part output under "notmuch show" allows for all
122 of the "notmuch show" options to be applied when extracting a single
123 part, (such as --format=json for extracting a message part with JSON
126 Deprecate "notmuch search-tags", (in favor of "notmuch search --output=tags *")
128 The "notmuch search-tags" sub-command has been redundant since the
129 addition of the --output=tags option to "notmuch search". We now
130 make that more clear by deprecating "notmuch search-tags", (dropping
131 it from the documentation). We do continue to support the old syntax
132 by translating it internally to the new call.
134 Performance improvements
135 ------------------------
136 Faster searches (by doing fewer searches to construct threads)
138 Whenever a user asks for search results as threads, notmuch first
139 performs a search for messages matching the query, then performs
140 additional searches to find other messages in the resulting threads.
142 Removing inefficiencies and redundancies in these secondary searches
143 results in a measured speedups of 1.5x for a typical search.
145 Faster searches (by doing fewer passes to gather message data)
147 Optimizing Xapian data access patterns (using a single pass to get
148 all message-document data rather than a pass for each data type)
149 results in a measured speedup of 1.7x for a typical search.
151 The benefits of this optimization combine with the preceding
152 optimization. With both in place, Austin Clements measured a speedup
153 of 2.5x for a search of all messages in his inbox (was 4.5s, now
154 1.8s). Thanks, Austin!
156 Faster initial indexing
158 More efficient indexing of new messages results in a measured
159 speedup of 1.4x for the initial indexing of 3 GB of mail (1h 14m
160 rather than 1h 46m). Thanks to Austin Clements and Michal Sojka.
162 Make "notmuch new" faster for unchanged directories
164 Optimizing to not do any further examinations of sub-directories
165 when the filesystem indicates that a directory is unchanged from the
166 last "notmuch new" results in measured speedups of 8.5 for the "No
167 new mail" case, (was 0.77s, now 0.09s). Thanks to Karel Zak.
169 New emacs-interface features
170 ----------------------------
172 Support for PGP/MIME (GnuPG)
174 Automatically indicate validity of signatures for multipart/signed
175 messages. Automatically display decrypted content for
176 multipart/encrypted messages. See the emacs variable
177 notmuch-crypto-process-mime for more information. Note that this
178 needs gpg-agent and a pinentry tool just as the command line tools.
179 Also note there is no support SMIME yet.
181 Output of pipe command is now displayed if pipe command fails
183 This is extremely useful in the common use case of piping a patch to
184 "git am". If git fails to cleanly merge the patch the error messages
185 from the failed merge are now clearly displayed to the user, (where
186 previously they were silently hidden from the user).
188 User-selectable From address
190 A user can choose which configured email addresses should be used as
191 the From address whenever composing a new message. To do so, simply
192 press C-u before the command which will open a new message. Emacs
193 will prompt for the from address to use.
195 The user can customize the "Notmuch Identities" setting in the
196 notmuch customize group in order to use addresses other than those in
197 the notmuch configuration file if desired.
199 The user can also choose to always be prompted for the from address
200 when composing a new message (without having to use C-u) by setting
201 the "Notmuch Always Prompt For Sender" option in the notmuch
204 Hiding of repeated subjects in collapsed thread view
206 In notmuch-show mode, if a collapsed message has the same subject as
207 its parent, the subject is not shown.
209 Automatic detection and hiding of original message in top-posted message
211 When a message contains a line looking something like:
213 ----- Original Message -----
215 emacs hides this and all subsequent lines as an "original message",
216 (allowing the user to click or press enter on the "original message"
217 button to display it again). This makes the handling of top-posted
218 citations work much like conventional citations.
220 New hooks for running code when tags are modified
222 Some users want to perform additional actions whenever a particular
223 tag is added/removed from a message. This could be used to, for
224 example, interface with some external spam-recognition training
225 tool. To facilitate this, two new hooks are added which can be
226 modified in the following settings of the notmuch customize group:
228 Notmuch Before Tag Hook
229 Notmuch After Tag Hook
231 New optional support for hiding some multipart/alternative parts
233 Many emails are sent with redundant content within a
234 multipart/alternative group (such as a text/plain part as well as a
235 text/html part). Users can configure the setting:
237 Notmuch Show All Multipart/Alternative Parts
239 to "off" in the notmuch customize group to have the interface
240 automatically hide some part alternatives (such as text/html
241 parts). This new part hiding is not configured by default yet
242 because there's not yet a simple way to re-display such a hidden
243 part if it is not actually redundant with a displayed part.
245 Better rendering of text/x-vcalendar parts
247 These parts are now displayed in a format suitable for use with the
250 Avoid getting confused by Subject and Author fields with newline characters
252 Replacing all characters with ASCII code less than 32 with a question mark.
254 Cleaner display of From line in email messages (remove double quotes,
255 and drop "name" if it's actually just a repeat of the email address).
257 Vim interface improvements
258 --------------------------
259 Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface:
261 * Using sendmail directly rather than mailx,
262 * Implementing archive in show view
263 * Add support to mark as read in show and search views
264 * Add delete commands
267 Bindings improvements
268 ---------------------
269 Ruby bindings are now much more complete
271 Including QUERY.sort, QUERY.to_s, MESSAGE.maildir_flags_to_tags,
272 MESSAGE.tags_to_maildir_flags, and MESSAGE.get_filenames
274 * Python bindings have been upodated and extended
275 (docs online at http://packages.python.org/notmuch/)
278 - Message().get_filenames(),
279 - Message().tags_to_maildir_flags(),Message().maildir_flags_to_tags()
280 - list(Threads()) and list(Messages) works now
282 - Message().__cmp__() and __hash__()
283 These allow, for example:
286 As well as set arithmetic on Messages():
288 s1, s2= set(msgs1), set(msgs2)
293 - len(Messages()) as it exausted the iterator.
294 Use len(list(Messages())) or
295 Query.count_messages() to get the length.
297 Added initial Go bindings in bindings/go
299 New build-system features
300 -------------------------
301 Added support for building in a directory other than the source directory
303 This can be used with the widely-supported idiom of simply running
304 the configure script from some other directory:
311 Fix to save configure options for future, implicit runs of configure
313 When a user updates the source (such as with "git pull") calling
314 "make" may cause an automatic re-run of the configure script. When
315 this happens, the configure script will automatically be called with
316 the same options the user originally passed in the most-recent
317 manual invocation of configure.
319 New test-suite feature
320 ----------------------
321 Binary for bash for running test suite now located via PATH.
323 The notmuch test suite requires a fairly recent version of bash (>=
324 bash 4). As some systems supply an older version of bash at
325 /bin/bash, the test suite is now updated to search $PATH to locate
326 the bash binary. This allows users of systems with old /bin/bash to
327 simply install bash >= 4 somewhere on $PATH before /bin and then use
330 Support for testing output with a trailing newline.
332 Previously, some tests would fail to notice a difference in the
333 presence/absence of a trailing newline in a program output, (which
334 has led to bugs in the past). Now, carefully-written tests (using
335 test_expect_equal_file rather than test_expect_equal) will detect
336 any change in the presence/absence of a trailing newline. Many tests
337 are updated to take advantage of this.
339 Avoiding accessing user's $HOME while running test suite
341 The test suite now carefully creates its own HOME directory. This
342 allows the test suite to be run with no existing HOME directory, (as
343 some build systems apparently do), and avoids test-suite differences
344 due to configuration files in the users HOME directory.
349 Output *all* files for "notmuch search --output=files"
351 For the cases where multiple files have the same Message ID,
352 previous versions of notmuch would output only one such file. This
353 command is now fixed to correctly output all files.
355 Fixed spurious search results from "overlapped" indexing of addresses
357 This fixed a bug where a search for:
359 to:user@elsewhere.com
361 would incorrectly match a message sent:
363 To: user@example,com, someone@elsewhere.com
365 Fix --output=json when search has no results
367 A bug present since notmuch 0.4 had caused searches with no results
368 to produce an invalid json object. This is now fixed to cleanly
369 return a valid json object representing an empty array "[]" as
372 fix the automatic detection of the From address for "notmuch reply"
373 from the Received headers in some cases.
375 Fix core dump on DragonFlyBSD due to -1 return value from
376 sysconf(_SC_GETPW_R_SIZE_MAX).
378 Cleaned up several memory leaks
380 Eliminated a few, rare segmentation faults and a double-free.
382 Fix libnotmuch library to only export notmuch API functions
384 Previous release of the notmuch library also exported some Xapian
385 C++ exception type symbols. These were never part of the library
386 interface and were never intended to be exported.
388 Emacs-interface bug fixes
389 -------------------------
390 Display any unexpected output or errors from "notmuch search" invocations
392 Previously any misformatted output or trailing error messages were
393 silently ignored. This output is now clearly displayed. This fix was
394 very helpful in identifying and fixing the bug described below.
396 Fix bug where some threads would be missing from large search results
398 When a search returned a "large" number of results, the emacs
399 interface was incorrectly dropping one thread every time the output
400 of the "notmuch search" process spanned the emacs read-buffer. This
403 Avoid re-compression of .gz files (and similar) when saving attachment
405 Emacs was being too clever for its own good and trying to
406 re-compress pre-compressed .gz files when saving such attachments
407 (potentially corrupting the attachment). The emacs interface is
408 fixed to avoid this bug.
410 Fix hiding of a message when a previously-hidden citation is visible
412 Previously the citation would remain visible in this case. This is
413 fixed so that hiding a message hides all parts.
415 Notmuch 0.5 (2010-11-11)
416 ========================
417 New, general features
418 ---------------------
419 Maildir-flag synchronization
421 Notmuch now knows how to synchronize flags in maildir filenames with
422 tags in the notmuch database. The following flag/tag mappings are
431 'S' unread (added when 'S' flag is not present)
433 The synchronization occurs in both directions, (for example, adding
434 the 'S' flag to a file will cause the "unread" tag to be added, and
435 adding the "replied" tag to a message will cause the file to be
436 renamed with an 'R' flag).
438 This synchronization is enabled by default for users of the
439 command-line interface, (though only files in directories named
440 "cur" or "new" will be renamed). It can be disabled by setting the
441 new maildir.synchronize_flags option in the configuration file. For
444 notmuch config set maildir.synchronize_flags false
446 Users upgrading may also want to run "notmuch setup" once (just
447 accept the existing configuration) to get a new, nicely-commented
448 [maildir] section added to the configuration file.
450 For users of the notmuch library, the new synchronization
451 functionality is available with the following two new functions:
453 notmuch_message_maildir_flags_to_tags
454 notmuch_message_tags_to_maildir_flags
456 It is anticipated that future improvements to this support will
457 allow for safe synchronization of the 'T' flag with the "deleted"
458 tag, as well as support for custom flag/tag mappings.
462 Support for querying multiple filenames for a single message
464 It is common for the mailstore to contain multiple files with the
465 same message ID. Previously, notmuch would always hide these
466 duplicate files, (returning a single, arbitrary filename with
467 notmuch_message_get_filename).
469 With this release, library users can access all filenames for a
470 message with the new function:
472 notmuch_message_get_filenames
474 Together with notmuch_filenames_valid, notmuch_filenames_get, and
475 notmuch_filenames_move_to_next it is now possible to iterate over
476 all available filenames for a given message.
478 New command-line features
479 -------------------------
480 New "notmuch show --format=raw" for getting at original email contents
482 This new feature allows for a fully-functional email client to be
483 built on top of the notmuch command-line without needing any direct
484 access to the mail store itself.
486 For example, it's now possible to run "emacs -f notmuch" on a local
487 machine with only ssh access to the mail store/notmuch database. To
488 do this, simply set the notmuch-command variable in emacs to the
489 name of a script containing:
491 ssh user@host notmuch "$@"
493 If the ssh client has enabled connection sharing (ControlMaster
494 option in OpenSSH), the emacs interface can be quite responsive this
499 Fix "notmuch search" to print nothing when nothing matches
501 The 0.4 release had a bug in which:
503 notmuch search <expression-with-no-matches>
505 would produce a single blank line of output, (where previous
506 versions would produce no output. This fix also causes a change in
507 the --format=json output, (which would previously produce "[]" and
508 now produces nothing).
510 Emacs interface improvements
511 ----------------------------
512 Fix to allow pipe ('|') command to work when using notmuch over ssh
514 Fix count of lines in hidden signatures.
516 Omit repeated subject lines in (collapsed) thread display.
518 Display current thread subject in a header line.
520 Provide a "c i" binding to copy a thread ID from the search view.
522 Allow for notmuch-fcc-dirs to have a value of nil.
524 Also, the more complex form of notmuch-fcc-dirs now has a slightly
525 different format. It no longer has a special first-element, fallback
526 string. Instead it's now a list of cons cells where the car of each
527 cell is a regular expression to be matched against the sender
528 address, and the cdr is the name of a folder to use for an FCC. So
529 the old fallback behavior can be achieved by including a final cell
530 of (".*" . "default-fcc-folder").
532 Vim interface improvements
533 --------------------------
534 Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface.
536 These include optimizations, support for newer versions of vim, fixed
537 support for sending mail on modern systems, new commands, and
542 Added initial ruby bindings in bindings/ruby
544 Notmuch 0.4 (2010-11-01)
545 ========================
546 New command-line features
547 -------------------------
548 notmuch search --output=(summary|threads|messages|tags|files)
550 This new option allows for particular items to be returned from
551 notmuch searches. The "summary" option is the default and behaves
552 just as "notmuch search" has historically behaved.
554 The new option values allow for thread IDs, message IDs, lists of
555 tags, and lists of filenames to be returned from searches. It is
556 expected that this new option will be very useful in shell
557 scripts. For example:
559 for file in $(notmuch search --output=files <search-terms>); do
560 <operations-on> "$file"
563 notmuch show --format=mbox <search-specification>
565 This new option allows for the messages matching a search
566 specification to be presented as an mbox. Specifically the "mboxrd"
567 format is used which allows for reversible quoting of lines
568 beginning with "From ". A reader should remove a single '>' from the
569 beginning of all lines beginning with one or more '>' characters
570 followed by the 5 characters "From ".
572 notmuch config [get|set] <section>.<item> [value ...]
574 The new top-level "config" command allows for any value in the
575 notmuch configuration file to be queried or set to a new value. Both
576 single-valued and multi-valued items are supported, as our any
577 custom items stored in the configuration file.
579 Avoid setting Bcc header in "notmuch reply"
581 We decided that this was a bit heavy-handed as the actual mail
582 user-agent should be responsible for setting any Bcc option. Also,
583 see below for the notmuch/emacs user-agent now setting an Fcc by
584 default rather than Bcc.
588 Add notmuch_query_get_query_string and notmuch_query_get_sort
590 These are simply functions for querying properties of a
591 notmuch_query_t object.
595 Enable Fcc of all sent messages by default (to "sent" directory)
597 All messages sent from the emacs interface will now be saved to the
598 notmuch mail store where they will be incorporated to the database
599 by the next "notmuch new". By default, messages are saved to the
600 "sent" directory at the top-level of the mail store. This directory
601 can be customized by means of the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" option in the
602 notmuch customize interface.
604 Ability to all open messages in a thread to a pipe
606 Historically, the '|' keybinding allows for piping a single message
607 to an external command. Now, by prefixing this key with a prefix
608 argument, (for example, by pressing "Control-U |"), all open
609 messages in the current thread will be sent to the external command.
611 Optional support for detecting inline patches
613 This hook is disabled by default but can be enabled with a checkbox
614 under "Notmuch Show Insert Text/Plain Hook" in the notmuch customize
615 interface. It allows for inline patches to be detected and treated
616 as if they were attachments, (with context-sensitive highlighting).
618 Automatically tag messages as "replied" when sending a reply
620 Messages replied to within the emacs interface will now be tagged as
621 "replied". This feature can easily be customized to add or remove
622 other tags as well. For example, a user might use a tag of
623 "needs-reply" and can configure this feature to automatically remove
624 that tag when replying. See "Notmuch Message Mark Replied" in the
625 notmuch customize interface.
627 Allow search-result color specifications to overlay each other
629 For example, one tag can specify the background color of matching
630 lines, while another can specify the foreground. With this change,
631 both settings will now be visible simultaneously, (which was not the
632 case in previous releases). See "Notmuch Search Line Faces" in the
633 notmuch customize interface.
635 Make hidden author names still available for incremental search.
637 When there is insufficient space to display all authors of a thread
638 in search results, the names of hidden authors are now still made
639 available to emacs' incremental search commands. As the user
640 searches, matching lines will temporarily expand to show the hidden
643 New binding of Control-TAB (works like TAB in reverse)
645 Many notmuch nodes already use TAB to navigate forward through
646 various items allowing actions, (message headers, email attachments,
647 etc.). The new Control-TAB binding operates similarly but in the
650 New build-system features
651 -------------------------
652 Various portability fixes have been applied
654 These include fixes for build failures on at least Solaris, FreeBSD,
655 and Fedora systems. We're hopeful that the notmuch code base is now
656 more portable than ever before.
658 Arrange for libnotmuch to be found automatically after make install
660 The notmuch build system is now careful to help the user avoid
661 errors of the form "libnotmuch.so could not be found" immediately
662 after installing. This support takes two forms:
664 1. If the library is installed to a system directory,
665 (configured in /etc/ld.so.conf), then "make install" will
666 automatically run ldconfig.
668 2. If the library is installed to a non-system directory, the
669 build system adds a DR_RUNPATH entry to the final binary
670 pointing to the directory to which the library is installed.
672 When this support works, the user should be able to run notmuch
673 immediately after "make install", without any errors trying to find
674 the notmuch library, and without having to manually set environment
675 variables such as LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
677 Check compiler/linker options before using them
679 The configure script now carefully checks that any desired
680 compilation options, (whether for enabling compiler warnings, or for
681 embedding rpath, etc.), are supported. Only supported options are
682 used in the resulting Makefile.
684 New test-suite features
685 -----------------------
686 New modularization of test suite.
688 Thanks to a gracious relicensing of the test-suite infrastructure
689 from the git project, notmuch now has a modular test suite. This
690 provides the ability to run individual sections of the test suite
691 rather than the whole things. It also provides better summary of
692 test results, with support for tests that are expected to fail
693 (BROKEN and FIXED) in addition to PASS and FAIL. Finally, it makes
694 it easy to run the test suite within valgrind (pass --valgrind to
695 notmuch-test or to any sub-script) which has been very useful.
697 New testing of emacs interface.
699 The test suite has been augmented to allow automated testing of the
700 emacs interfaces. So far, this includes basic searches, display of
701 threads, and tag manipulation. This also includes a test that a new
702 message can successfully be sent out through a (dummy) SMTP server
703 and that said message is successfully integrated into the notmuch
704 database via the FCC setting.
708 Fix potential corruption of database when "notmuch new " is interrupted.
710 Previously, an interruption of "notmuch new" would (rarely) result
711 in a corrupt database. The corruption would manifest itself by a
712 persistent error of the form:
714 document ID of 1234 has no thread ID
716 The message-adding code has been carefully audited and reworked to
717 avoid this sort of corruption regardless of when it is interrupted.
719 Fix failure with extremely long message ID headers.
721 Previously, a message with an extremely long message ID, (say, more
722 than 300 characters), would fail to be added to notmuch, (triggering
723 Xapian exceptions). This has now been fixed.
725 Fix for messages with "charset=unknown-8bit"
727 Previously, messages with this charset would cause notmuch to emit a
728 GMime warning, (which would then trip up emacs or other interfaces
729 parsing the notmuch results).
731 Fix notmuch_query_search_threads function to return NULL on any exception
733 Fix "notmuch search" to return non-zero if notmuch_query_search_threads fails
735 Previously, this command could confusingly report a Xapian
736 exception, yet still return an error code of 0. It now correctly
737 returns a failing error code of 1 in this case.
741 Fix to handle a message with a subject containing, for example "[1234]"
743 Previously, a message subject containing a sequence of digits within
744 square brackets would cause the emacs interface to mis-parse the
745 output of "notmuch search". This would result in the message being
746 mis-displayed and prevent the user from manipulating the message in
749 Fix to correctly handle message IDs containing ".."
751 The emacs interface now properly quotes message IDs to avoid a
752 Xapian bug in which the ".." within a message ID would be
753 misinterpreted as a numeric range specification.
757 The python bindings for notmuch have been updated to work with python3.
759 Debian-specific fixes
760 ---------------------
761 Fix emacs initialization so "M-x notmuch" works for users by default.
763 Now, a new Debian user can immediately run "emacs -f notmuch" after
764 "apt-get install notmuch". Previously, the user would have had to
765 edit the ~/.emacs file to add "(require 'notmuch)" before this would
768 Notmuch 0.3.1 (2010-04-27)
769 ==========================
772 Fix an infinite loop in "notmuch reply"
774 This bug could be triggered by replying to a message where the
775 user's primary email address did not appear in the To: header and
776 the user had not configured any secondary email addresses. The bug
777 was a simple re-use of the same iterator variable in nested loops.
779 Fix a potential SEGV in "notmuch search"
781 This bug could be triggered by an author name ending in a ','.
782 Admittedly - that's almost certainly a spam email, but we never
783 want notmuch to crash.
787 Fix calculations for line wrapping in the primary "notmuch" view.
789 Fix Fcc support to prompt to create a directory if the specified Fcc
790 directory does not exist.
794 Fix build on OpenSolaris (at least) due to missing 'extern "C"' block.
796 Without this, the C++ sources could not find strcasestr and the
797 final linking of notmuch would fail.
799 Notmuch 0.3 (2010-04-27)
800 ========================
801 New command-line features
802 -------------------------
803 User-configurable tags for new messages
805 A new "new.tags" option is available in the configuration file to
806 determine which tags are applied to new messages. Run "notmuch
807 setup" to generate new documentation within ~/.notmuch-config on how
808 to specify this value.
810 Threads search results named based on subjects that match search
812 This means that when new mails arrived to a thread you've previously
813 read, and the new mails have a new subject, you will see that
814 subject in the search results rather than the old subject.
816 Faster operation of "notmuch tag" (avoid unneeded sorting)
818 Since the user just wants to tag all matching messages, we can make
819 things perform a bit faster by avoiding the sort.
821 Even Better guessing of From: header for "notmuch reply"
823 Notmuch now looks at a number of headers when trying to figure out
824 the best From: header to use in a reply. This is helpful if you have
825 several configured email addresses, and you also subscribe to various
826 mailing lists with different addresses, (so that mails you are
827 replying to won't always include your subscribed address in the To:
830 Indication of author names that match a search
832 When notmuch displays threads as the result of a search, it now
833 lists the authors that match the search before listing the other
834 authors in the thread. It inserts a pipe '|' symbol between the last
835 matching and first non-matching author. This is especially useful in
836 a search that includes tag:unread. Now the authors of the unread
837 messages in the thread are listed first.
841 Sebastian Spaeth has contributed his python bindings for the notmuch
842 library to the central repository. These bindings were previously
843 known as "cnotmuch" within python but have now been renamed to be
844 accessible with a simple, and more official-looking "import notmuch".
846 The bindings have already proven very useful as people proficient in
847 python have been able to easily develop programs to do notmuch-based
848 searches for email-address completion, maildir-flag synchronization,
851 These bindings are available within the bindings/python directory, but
852 are not yet integrated into the top-level Makefiles, nor the top-level
853 package-building scripts. Improvements are welcome.
855 Emacs interface improvements
856 ----------------------------
857 An entirely new initial view for notmuch, (friendly yet powerful)
859 Some of us call the new view "notmuch hello" but you can get at it
860 by simply calling "emacs -f notmuch". The new view provides a search
861 bar where new searches can be performed. It also displays a list of
862 recent searches, along with a button to save any of these, giving it
863 a new name as a "saved search". Many people find these "saved
864 searches" one of the most convenient ways of organizing their mail,
865 (providing all of the features of "folders" in other mail clients,
866 but without any of the disadvantages).
868 Finally, this view can also optionally display all of the tags that
869 exist in the database, along with a count for each tag, and a custom
870 search of messages with that tag that's simply a click (or keypress)
873 Note: For users that liked the original mode of "emacs -f notmuch"
874 immediately displaying a particular search result, we
875 recommend instead running something like:
877 emacs --eval '(notmuch search "tag:inbox" t)'
879 The "t" means to sort the messages in an "oldest first" order,
880 (as notmuch would do previously by default). You can also
881 leave that off to have your search results in "newest first"
884 Full-featured "customize" support for configuring notmuch
886 Notmuch now plugs in well to the emacs "customize" mode to make it
887 much simpler to find things about the notmuch interface that can be
890 You can get to this mode by starting at the main "Customize" menu in
891 emacs, then browsing through "Applications", "Mail", and
892 "Notmuch". Or you can go straight to "M-x customize-group"
895 Once you're at the customize screen, you'll see a list of documented
896 options that can be manipulated along with checkboxes, drop-down
897 selectors, and text-entry boxes for configuring the various
900 Support for doing tab-completion of email addresses
902 This support currently relies on an external program,
903 (notmuch-addresses), that is not yet shipped with notmuch
904 itself. But multiple, suitable implementations of this program have
905 already been written that generate address completions by doing
906 notmuch searches of your email collection. For example, providing
907 first those addresses that you have composed messages to in the
910 One such program (implemented in python with the python bindings to
911 notmuch) is available via:
913 git clone http://jkr.acm.jhu.edu/git/notmuch_addresses.git
915 Install that program as notmuch-addresses on your PATH, and then
916 hitting TAB on a partial email address or name within the To: or Cc:
917 line of an email message will provide matching completions.
919 Support for file-based (Fcc) delivery of sent messages to mail store
921 This isn't yet enabled by default. To enable this, one will have to
922 set the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" setting within the notmuch customize
923 screen, (see its documentation there for details). We anticipate
924 making this automatic in a future release.
926 New 'G' key binding to trigger mail refresh (G == "Get new mail")
928 The 'G' key works wherever '=' works. Before refreshing the screen
929 it calls an external program that can be used to poll email servers,
930 run notmuch new and setup specific tags for the new emails. The
931 script to be called should be configured with the "Notmuch Poll
932 Script" setting in the customize interface. This script will
933 typically invoke "notmuch new" and then perhaps several "notmuch
936 Implement emacs message display with the JSON output from notmuch.
938 This is much more robust than the previous implementation, (where
939 some HTML mails and mail quoting the notmuch code with the delimiter
940 characters in it would cause the parser to fall over).
942 Better handling of HTML messages and MIME attachments (inline images!)
944 Allow for any MIME parts that emacs can display to be displayed
945 inline. This includes inline viewing of image attachments, (provided
946 the window is large enough to fit the image at its natural size).
948 Much more robust handling of HTML messages. Currently both text/plain
949 and text/html alternates will be rendered next to each other. In a
950 future release, users will be able to decide to see only one or the
951 other representation.
953 Each attachment now has its own button so that attachments can be
954 saved individually (the 'w' key is still available to save all
957 Customizable support for tidying of text/plain message content
959 Many new functions are available for tidying up message
960 content. These include options such as wrapping long lines,
961 compressing duplicate blank lines, etc.
963 Most of these are disabled by default, but can easily be enabled by
964 clicking the available check boxes under the "Notmuch Show Insert
965 Text/Plain Hook" within the notmuch customize screen.
967 New support for searchable citations (even when hidden)
969 When portions of overly-long citations are hidden, the contents of
970 these citations will still be available for emacs' standard
971 "incremental search" functions. When the search matches any portion
972 of a hidden citation, the citation will become visible temporarily
973 to display the search result.
975 More flexible handling of header visibility
977 As an answer to complaints from many users, the To, Cc, and Date
978 headers of messages are no longer hidden by default. For those users
979 that liked that these were hidden, a new "Notmuch Messages Headers
980 Visible" option in the customize interface can be set to nil. The
981 visibility of headers can still be toggled on a per-message basis
982 with the 'h' keybinding.
984 For users that don't want to see some subset of those headers, the
985 new "Notmuch Message Headers" variable can be customized to list
986 only those headers that should be present in the display of a message.
988 The Return key now toggles message visibility anywhere
990 Previously this worked only on the first summary-line of a message.
992 Customizable formatting of search results
994 The user can easily customize the order, width, and formatting of
995 the various fields in a "notmuch search" buffer. See the "Notmuch
996 Search Result Format" section of the customize interface.
998 Generate nicer names for search buffers when using a saved search.
1000 Add a notmuch User-Agent header when sending mail from notmuch/emacs.
1002 New keybinding (M-Ret) to open all collapsed messages in a thread.
1006 Provide a new NOTMUCH_SORT_UNSORTED value for queries
1008 This can be somewhat faster when sorting simply isn't desired. For
1009 example when collecting a set of messages that will all be
1010 manipulated identically, (adding a tag, removing a tag, deleting the
1011 messages), then there's no advantage to sorting the messages by
1016 Fix to compile against GMime 2.6
1018 Previously notmuch insisted on being able to find GMime 2.4, (even
1019 though GMime 2.6 would have worked all along).
1021 Fix configure script to accept (and ignore) various standard options.
1023 For example, those that the Gentoo build scripts expect configure to
1024 accept are now all accepted.
1028 A large number of new tests for the many new features.
1030 Better display of output from failed tests.
1032 Now shows failures with diff rather than forcing the user to gaze at
1033 complete actual and expected output looking for deviation.
1035 Notmuch 0.2 (2010-04-16)
1036 ========================
1037 This is the second release of the notmuch mail system, with actual
1038 detailed release notes this time!
1040 This release consists of a number of minor new features that make
1041 notmuch more pleasant to use, and a few fairly major bug fixes.
1043 We didn't quite hit our release target of "about a week" from the 0.1
1044 release, (0.2 is happening 11 days after 0.1), but we hope to do
1045 better for next week. Look forward to some major features coming to
1046 notmuch in subsequent releases.
1052 Better guessing of From: header.
1054 Notmuch now tries harder to guess which configured address should be
1055 used as the From: line in a "notmuch reply". It will examine the
1056 Received: headers if it fails to find any configured address in To:
1057 or Cc:. This allows it to often choose the correct address even when
1058 replying to a message sent to a mailing list, and not directly to a
1061 Make "notmuch count" with no arguments count all messages
1063 Previously, it was hard to construct a search term that was
1064 guaranteed to match all messages.
1066 Provide a new special-case search term of "*" to match all messages.
1068 This can be used in any command accepting a search term, such as
1069 "notmuch search '*'". Note that you'll want to take care that the
1070 shell doesn't expand * against the current files. And note that the
1071 support for "*" is a special case. It's only meaningful as a single
1072 search term and loses its special meaning when combined with any
1075 Automatically detect thread connections even when a parent message is
1078 Previously, if two or more message were received with a common
1079 parent, but that parent was not received, then these messages would
1080 not be recognized as belonging to the same thread. This is now fixed
1081 so that such messages are properly connected in a thread.
1085 Fix potential data loss in "notmuch new" with SIGINT
1087 One code path in "notmuch new" was not properly handling
1088 SIGINT. Previously, this could lead to messages being removed from
1089 the database (and their tags being lost) if the user pressed
1090 Control-C while "notmuch new" was working.
1092 Fix segfault when a message includes a MIME part that is empty.
1094 Fix handling of non-ASCII characters with --format=json
1096 Previously, characters outside the range of 7-bit ASCII were
1097 silently dropped from the JSON output. This led to corrupted display
1098 of utf-8 content in the upcoming notmuch web-based frontends.
1100 Fix headers to be properly decoded in "notmuch reply"
1102 Previously, the user might see:
1104 Subject: Re: =?iso-8859-2?q?Rozlu=E8ka?=
1108 Subject: Re: Rozlučka
1110 The former text is properly encoded to be RFC-compliant SMTP, will
1111 be sent correctly, and will be properly decoded by the
1112 recipient. But the user trying to edit the reply would likely be
1113 unable to read or edit that field in its encoded form.
1115 Emacs client features
1116 ---------------------
1117 Show the last few lines of citations as well as the first few lines.
1119 It's often the case that the last sentence of a citation is what is
1120 being replied to directly, so the last few lines are often much more
1121 important. The number of lines shown at the beginning and end of any
1122 citation can be configured, (notmuch-show-citation-lines-prefix and
1123 notmuch-show-citation-lines-suffix).
1125 The '+' and '-' commands in the search view can now add and remove
1128 Selective bulk tagging is now possible by selecting a region of
1129 threads and then using either the '+' or '-' keybindings. Bulk
1130 tagging is still available for all threads matching the current
1131 search with the '*' binding.
1133 More meaningful buffer names for thread-view buffers.
1135 Notmuch now uses the Subject of the thread as the buffer
1136 name. Previously it was using the thread ID, which is a meaningless
1139 Provide for customized colors of threads in search view based on tags.
1141 See the documentation of notmuch-search-line-faces, (or us "M-x
1142 customize" and browse to the "notmuch" group within "Applications"
1143 and "Mail"), for details on how to configure this colorization.
1145 Build-system features
1146 ---------------------
1147 Add support to properly build libnotmuch on Darwin systems (OS X).
1149 Add support to configure for many standard options.
1151 We include actual support for:
1153 --includedir --mandir --sysconfdir
1155 And accept and silently ignore several more:
1157 --build --infodir --libexecdir --localstatedir
1158 --disable-maintainer-mode --disable-dependency-tracking
1160 Install emacs client in "make install" rather than requiring a
1161 separate "make install-emacs".
1163 Automatically compute versions numbers between releases.
1165 This support uses the git-describe notation, so a version such as
1166 0.1-144-g43cbbfc indicates a version that is 144 commits since the
1167 0.1 release and is available as git commit "43cbbfc".
1169 Add a new "make test" target to run the test suite and actually verify
1172 Notmuch 0.1 (2010-04-05)
1173 ========================
1174 This is the first release of the notmuch mail system.
1176 It includes the libnotmuch library, the notmuch command-line
1177 interface, and an emacs-based interface to notmuch.
1179 Note: Notmuch will work best with Xapian 1.0.18 (or later) or Xapian
1180 1.1.4 (or later). Previous versions of Xapian (whether 1.0 or 1.1) had
1181 a performance bug that made notmuch very slow when modifying
1182 tags. This would cause distracting pauses when reading mail while
1183 notmuch would wait for Xapian when removing the "inbox" and "unread"
1184 tags from messages in a thread.