1 Notmuch 0.11 (201x-xx-xx)
2 =========================
4 New command-line features
5 -------------------------
9 Hooks have been introduced to notmuch. Hooks are scripts that notmuch
10 invokes before and after certain actions. Initially, "notmuch new"
11 supports "pre-new" and "post-new" hooks that are run before and after
12 importing new messages into the database.
17 Automatic tag query optimization
19 "notmuch tag" now automatically optimizes the user's query to
20 exclude messages whose tags won't change. In the past, we've
21 suggested that people do this by hand; this is no longer necessary.
23 Don't sort messages when creating a dump file
25 This speeds up tag dumps considerably, without any loss of
31 Reduction of memory leaks
33 Two memory leaks when searching and showing messages were identified
34 and fixed in this release.
41 notmuch-show-advance (bound to the spacebar in notmuch-show-mode) had
42 a bug that caused it to always jump to the next message, even if it
43 should have scrolled down to show more of the current message instead.
46 Support "notmuch new" as a notmuch-poll-script
48 It's now possible to use "notmuch new" as a notmuch-poll-script
49 directly. This is also the new default. This allows taking better
50 advantage of the "notmuch new" hooks from emacs without intermediate
53 Improvements in saved search management
55 New saved searches are now appended to the list of saved searches,
56 not inserted in front. It's also possible to define a sort function
57 for displaying saved searches; alphabetical sort is provided.
59 Enable hooks for notmuch-hello-mode and notmuch-hello-refresh
61 Customizable message indentation width
63 notmuch-show-indent-messages-width
65 Customizable thousands separator
67 The new configuration variable is notmuch-hello-thousands-separator.
68 The default is now a space instead of a comma.
70 Call notmuch-show instead of notmuch-search when clicking on
73 New function notmuch-show-advance
75 This new function advances through just the current thread, and is
76 less invasive than notmuch-show-advance-and-archive. It can easily
79 (define-key notmuch-show-mode-map " " 'notmuch-show-advance)
81 Various performance improvements.
86 The tool contrib/notmuch-deliver helps with initial delivery and
87 tagging of mail (replacing running notmuch new).
90 Notmuch 0.10.2 (2011-12-04)
91 ===========================
96 Fix crash in python bindings.
98 The python bindings did not call g_type_init, which caused crashes
99 for some, but not all users.
101 Notmuch 0.10.1 (2011-11-25)
102 ===========================
109 Argument processing changes in 0.10 introduced a bug where "notmuch
110 --help" crashed while "notmuch help" worked fine. This is fixed in
113 Notmuch 0.10 (2011-11-23)
114 =========================
116 New build and testing features
117 ------------------------------
119 Emacs tests are now done in dtach. This means that dtach is now
120 needed to run the notmuch test suite, at least until the checking for
121 prerequisites is improved.
123 Full test coverage of the stashing feature in Emacs.
125 New command-line features
126 -------------------------
128 Add "notmuch restore --accumulate" option
130 The --accumulate switch causes the union of the existing and new tags to be
131 applied, instead of replacing each message's tags as they are read in from
134 Add search terms to "notmuch dump"
136 The dump command now takes an optional search term much like notmuch
137 search/show/tag. The output file argument of dump is deprecated in
138 favour of using stdout.
140 Add "notmuch search" --offset and --limit options
142 The search command now takes options --offset=[-]N and --limit=N to limit
143 the number of results shown.
145 Add "notmuch count --output" option
147 The count command is now capable of counting threads in addition to
148 messages. This is selected using the new --output=(threads|messages) option.
150 New emacs UI features
151 ---------------------
153 Add tab-completion for notmuch-search and notmuch-search-filter
155 These functions now support completion tags for query parts
156 starting with "tag:".
158 Turn "id:MSG-ID" links into buttons associated with notmuch searches
160 Text of the form "id:MSG-ID" in mails is now a clickable button that
161 opens a notmuch search for the given message id.
163 Add keybinding ('c I') for stashing Message-ID's without an id: prefix
165 Reduces manual labour when stashing them for use outside notmuch.
167 Do not query on notmuch-search exit
169 It is harmless to kill the external notmuch process, so the user
170 is no longer interrogated when they interrupt a search.
175 Emacs now constructs large search buffers more efficiently
177 Search avoids opening and parsing message files
179 We now store more information in the database so search no longer
180 has to open every message file to get basic headers. This can
181 improve search speed by as much as 10X, but taking advantage of this
182 requires a database rebuild:
184 notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
185 # Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
187 notmuch restore notmuch.dump
189 New collection of add-on tools
190 ------------------------------
192 The source directory "contrib" contains tools built on notmuch. These
193 tools are not part of notmuch, and you should check their individual
194 licenses. Feel free to report problems with them to the notmuch
197 nmbug - share tags with a given prefix
199 nmbug helps maintain a git repo containing all tags with a given
200 prefix (by default "notmuch::"). Tags can be shared by commiting
201 them to git in one location and restoring in another.
203 Notmuch 0.9 (2011-10-01)
204 ========================
206 New, general features
207 ---------------------
209 Correct handling of interruptions during "notmuch new"
211 "notmuch new" now operates as a series of small, self-consistent
212 transactions, so it can correctly resume after an interruption or
213 crash. Previously, interruption could lose existing tags, fail to
214 detect messages on resume, or leave the database in a state
215 temporarily or permanently inconsistent with the mail store.
222 notmuch_database_begin_atomic and notmuch_database_end_atomic allow
223 multiple database operations to be performed atomically.
225 notmuch_database_find_message_by_filename does exactly what it says.
229 notmuch_database_find_message (and n_d_f_m_by_filename) now return
230 a status indicator and uses an output parameter for the
231 message. This change required changing the SONAME of libnotmuch to
234 Python bindings changes
235 -----------------------
237 - Re-encode python unicode objects to utf-8 before passing back to
239 - Support Database().begin_atomic()/end_atomic()
240 - Support Database().find_message_by_filename()
241 NB! This needs a db opened in READ-WRITE mode currently, or it will crash
242 the python process. The is a limitation (=bug) of the underlying libnotmuch.
243 - Fixes where we would not throw NotmuchErrors when we should (Justus Winter)
244 - Update for n_d_find_message* API changes (see above).
246 Ruby bindings changes
247 ---------------------
249 - Wrap new library functions notmuch_database_{begin,end}_atomic.
250 - Add new exception Notmuch::UnbalancedAtomicError.
251 - Rename destroy to destroy! according to Ruby naming conventions.
252 - Update for n_d_find_message* API changes (see above).
257 * Add gpg callback to crypto sigstatus buttons to retrieve/refresh
259 * Add notmuch-show-refresh-view function (and corresponding binding)
260 to refresh the view of a notmuch-show buffer.
262 Reply formatting cleanup
263 ------------------------
265 "notmuch reply" no longer includes notification that non-leafnode
266 MIME parts are being suppressed.
268 Notmuch 0.8 (2011-09-10)
269 ========================
271 Improved handling of message/rfc822 parts
273 Both in the CLI and the emacs interface. Output of rfc822 parts now
274 includes the primary headers, as well as the body and all subparts.
275 Output of the completely raw rfc822-formatted message, including all
276 headers, is unfortunately not yet supported (but hopefully will be
279 Improved Build system portability
281 Certain parts of the shell script generating notmuch.sym were
282 specific to the GNU versions of sed and nm. The new version should
283 be more portable to e.g. OpenBSD.
285 Documentation update for Ruby bindings
287 Added documentation, typo fixes, and improved support for rdoc.
289 Unicode, iterator, PEP8 changes for python bindings
291 - PEP8 (code formatting) changes for python files.
292 - Remove Tags.__len__ ; see 0.6 release notes for motivation.
293 - Decode headers as UTF8, encode (unicode) database paths as UTF8.
295 Notmuch 0.7 (2011-08-01)
296 ========================
298 Vim interface improvements
299 --------------------------
301 Jason Woofenden provided a number of bug fixes for the Vim interface
303 * fix citation/signature fold lengths
304 * fix cig/cit parsing within multipart/*
305 * fix on-screen instructions for show-signature
306 * fix from list reformatting in search view
307 * fix space key: now archives (did opposite)
309 Uwe Kleine-König contributed
311 * use full path for sendmail/doc fix
312 * fix compose temp file name
314 Python Bindings changes
315 -----------------------
317 Sebastian Spaeth contributed two changes related to unicode and UTF8:
319 * message tags are now explicitly unicode
320 * query string is encoded as a UTF8 byte string
322 Build-System improvements
323 ------------------------
325 Generate notmuch.sym after the relevant object files
327 This fixes a bug in parallel building. Thanks to Thomas Jost for the
330 Notmuch 0.6.1 (2011-07-17)
331 ==========================
336 Re-export Xapian exception typeinfo symbols.
338 It turned out our aggressive symbol hiding caused problems for
339 people running gcc 4.4.5.
341 Notmuch 0.6 (2011-07-01)
342 =======================
343 New, general features
344 ---------------------
345 Folder-based searching
347 Notmuch queries can now include a search term to match the
348 directories in which mail files are stored (within the mail
349 storage). The syntax is as follows:
353 For example, one might use things such as:
359 to match any path containing a directory "spam", "work/todo", or
360 containing a directory starting with "2011-", respectively.
362 This feature is particularly useful for users of delivery-agent
363 software (such as procmail or maildrop) that is filtering mail and
364 delivering it to particular folders, or users of systems such as
365 Gmail that use filesystem directories to indicate message tags.
367 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
368 notmuch will be searchable with folder: terms. In order to enable
369 this feature for all mail, the entire notmuch index will need to be
372 notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
373 # Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
375 notmuch restore notmuch.dump
379 Both the command line interface and the emacs-interface have new
380 support for PGP/MIME, detailed below. Thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor
381 and Jameson Graef Rollins for making this happen.
383 New, automatic tags: "signed" and "encrypted"
385 These tags will automatically be applied to messages containing
386 multipart/signed and multipart/encrypted parts.
388 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
389 notmuch will receive these tags.
391 New command-line features
392 -------------------------
393 Add new "notmuch show --verify" option for signature verification
395 This option instruct notmuch to verify the signature of
396 PGP/MIME-signed parts.
398 Add new "notmuch show --decrypt" and "notmuch reply --decrypt" options
400 This option instructs notmuch to decrypt PGP/MIME-encrypted parts.
401 Note that this feature currently requires gpg-agent and a passphrase entry
402 tool (e.g. pinentry-gtk or pinentry-curses).
404 Proper nesting of multipart parts in "notmuch show" output
406 MIME parts are now display with proper nesting to reflect original
407 MIME hierarchy of a message. This allows clients to correctly
408 analyze the MIME structure, (such as, for example, determining to
409 which parts a signature part applies).
411 Add new "notmuch show --part" option
413 This is a replacement for the older "notmuch part" command, (which
414 is now deprecated—it should still work as always, but is no longer
415 documented). Putting part output under "notmuch show" allows for all
416 of the "notmuch show" options to be applied when extracting a single
417 part, (such as --format=json for extracting a message part with JSON
420 Deprecate "notmuch search-tags", (in favor of "notmuch search --output=tags *")
422 The "notmuch search-tags" sub-command has been redundant since the
423 addition of the --output=tags option to "notmuch search". We now
424 make that more clear by deprecating "notmuch search-tags", (dropping
425 it from the documentation). We do continue to support the old syntax
426 by translating it internally to the new call.
428 Performance improvements
429 ------------------------
430 Faster searches (by doing fewer searches to construct threads)
432 Whenever a user asks for search results as threads, notmuch first
433 performs a search for messages matching the query, then performs
434 additional searches to find other messages in the resulting threads.
436 Removing inefficiencies and redundancies in these secondary searches
437 results in a measured speedups of 1.5x for a typical search.
439 Faster searches (by doing fewer passes to gather message data)
441 Optimizing Xapian data access patterns (using a single pass to get
442 all message-document data rather than a pass for each data type)
443 results in a measured speedup of 1.7x for a typical search.
445 The benefits of this optimization combine with the preceding
446 optimization. With both in place, Austin Clements measured a speedup
447 of 2.5x for a search of all messages in his inbox (was 4.5s, now
448 1.8s). Thanks, Austin!
450 Faster initial indexing
452 More efficient indexing of new messages results in a measured
453 speedup of 1.4x for the initial indexing of 3 GB of mail (1h 14m
454 rather than 1h 46m). Thanks to Austin Clements and Michal Sojka.
456 Make "notmuch new" faster for unchanged directories
458 Optimizing to not do any further examinations of sub-directories
459 when the filesystem indicates that a directory is unchanged from the
460 last "notmuch new" results in measured speedups of 8.5 for the "No
461 new mail" case, (was 0.77s, now 0.09s). Thanks to Karel Zak.
463 New emacs-interface features
464 ----------------------------
466 Support for PGP/MIME (GnuPG)
468 Automatically indicate validity of signatures for multipart/signed
469 messages. Automatically display decrypted content for
470 multipart/encrypted messages. See the emacs variable
471 notmuch-crypto-process-mime for more information. Note that this
472 needs gpg-agent and a pinentry tool just as the command line tools.
473 Also note there is no support SMIME yet.
475 Output of pipe command is now displayed if pipe command fails
477 This is extremely useful in the common use case of piping a patch to
478 "git am". If git fails to cleanly merge the patch the error messages
479 from the failed merge are now clearly displayed to the user, (where
480 previously they were silently hidden from the user).
482 User-selectable From address
484 A user can choose which configured email addresses should be used as
485 the From address whenever composing a new message. To do so, simply
486 press C-u before the command which will open a new message. Emacs
487 will prompt for the from address to use.
489 The user can customize the "Notmuch Identities" setting in the
490 notmuch customize group in order to use addresses other than those in
491 the notmuch configuration file if desired.
493 The user can also choose to always be prompted for the from address
494 when composing a new message (without having to use C-u) by setting
495 the "Notmuch Always Prompt For Sender" option in the notmuch
498 Hiding of repeated subjects in collapsed thread view
500 In notmuch-show mode, if a collapsed message has the same subject as
501 its parent, the subject is not shown.
503 Automatic detection and hiding of original message in top-posted message
505 When a message contains a line looking something like:
507 ----- Original Message -----
509 emacs hides this and all subsequent lines as an "original message",
510 (allowing the user to click or press enter on the "original message"
511 button to display it again). This makes the handling of top-posted
512 citations work much like conventional citations.
514 New hooks for running code when tags are modified
516 Some users want to perform additional actions whenever a particular
517 tag is added/removed from a message. This could be used to, for
518 example, interface with some external spam-recognition training
519 tool. To facilitate this, two new hooks are added which can be
520 modified in the following settings of the notmuch customize group:
522 Notmuch Before Tag Hook
523 Notmuch After Tag Hook
525 New optional support for hiding some multipart/alternative parts
527 Many emails are sent with redundant content within a
528 multipart/alternative group (such as a text/plain part as well as a
529 text/html part). Users can configure the setting:
531 Notmuch Show All Multipart/Alternative Parts
533 to "off" in the notmuch customize group to have the interface
534 automatically hide some part alternatives (such as text/html
535 parts). This new part hiding is not configured by default yet
536 because there's not yet a simple way to re-display such a hidden
537 part if it is not actually redundant with a displayed part.
539 Better rendering of text/x-vcalendar parts
541 These parts are now displayed in a format suitable for use with the
544 Avoid getting confused by Subject and Author fields with newline characters
546 Replacing all characters with ASCII code less than 32 with a question mark.
548 Cleaner display of From line in email messages (remove double quotes,
549 and drop "name" if it's actually just a repeat of the email address).
551 Vim interface improvements
552 --------------------------
553 Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface:
555 * Using sendmail directly rather than mailx,
556 * Implementing archive in show view
557 * Add support to mark as read in show and search views
558 * Add delete commands
561 Bindings improvements
562 ---------------------
563 Ruby bindings are now much more complete
565 Including QUERY.sort, QUERY.to_s, MESSAGE.maildir_flags_to_tags,
566 MESSAGE.tags_to_maildir_flags, and MESSAGE.get_filenames
568 * Python bindings have been updated and extended
569 (docs online at http://packages.python.org/notmuch/)
572 - Message().get_filenames(),
573 - Message().tags_to_maildir_flags(),Message().maildir_flags_to_tags()
574 - list(Threads()) and list(Messages) works now
576 - Message().__cmp__() and __hash__()
577 These allow, for example:
580 As well as set arithmetic on Messages():
582 s1, s2= set(msgs1), set(msgs2)
587 - len(Messages()) as it exhausted the iterator.
588 Use len(list(Messages())) or
589 Query.count_messages() to get the length.
591 Added initial Go bindings in bindings/go
593 New build-system features
594 -------------------------
595 Added support for building in a directory other than the source directory
597 This can be used with the widely-supported idiom of simply running
598 the configure script from some other directory:
605 Fix to save configure options for future, implicit runs of configure
607 When a user updates the source (such as with "git pull") calling
608 "make" may cause an automatic re-run of the configure script. When
609 this happens, the configure script will automatically be called with
610 the same options the user originally passed in the most-recent
611 manual invocation of configure.
613 New test-suite feature
614 ----------------------
615 Binary for bash for running test suite now located via PATH.
617 The notmuch test suite requires a fairly recent version of bash (>=
618 bash 4). As some systems supply an older version of bash at
619 /bin/bash, the test suite is now updated to search $PATH to locate
620 the bash binary. This allows users of systems with old /bin/bash to
621 simply install bash >= 4 somewhere on $PATH before /bin and then use
624 Support for testing output with a trailing newline.
626 Previously, some tests would fail to notice a difference in the
627 presence/absence of a trailing newline in a program output, (which
628 has led to bugs in the past). Now, carefully-written tests (using
629 test_expect_equal_file rather than test_expect_equal) will detect
630 any change in the presence/absence of a trailing newline. Many tests
631 are updated to take advantage of this.
633 Avoiding accessing user's $HOME while running test suite
635 The test suite now carefully creates its own HOME directory. This
636 allows the test suite to be run with no existing HOME directory, (as
637 some build systems apparently do), and avoids test-suite differences
638 due to configuration files in the users HOME directory.
643 Output *all* files for "notmuch search --output=files"
645 For the cases where multiple files have the same Message ID,
646 previous versions of notmuch would output only one such file. This
647 command is now fixed to correctly output all files.
649 Fixed spurious search results from "overlapped" indexing of addresses
651 This fixed a bug where a search for:
653 to:user@elsewhere.com
655 would incorrectly match a message sent:
657 To: user@example,com, someone@elsewhere.com
659 Fix --output=json when search has no results
661 A bug present since notmuch 0.4 had caused searches with no results
662 to produce an invalid json object. This is now fixed to cleanly
663 return a valid json object representing an empty array "[]" as
666 fix the automatic detection of the From address for "notmuch reply"
667 from the Received headers in some cases.
669 Fix core dump on DragonFlyBSD due to -1 return value from
670 sysconf(_SC_GETPW_R_SIZE_MAX).
672 Cleaned up several memory leaks
674 Eliminated a few, rare segmentation faults and a double-free.
676 Fix libnotmuch library to only export notmuch API functions
678 Previous release of the notmuch library also exported some Xapian
679 C++ exception type symbols. These were never part of the library
680 interface and were never intended to be exported.
682 Emacs-interface bug fixes
683 -------------------------
684 Display any unexpected output or errors from "notmuch search" invocations
686 Previously any misformatted output or trailing error messages were
687 silently ignored. This output is now clearly displayed. This fix was
688 very helpful in identifying and fixing the bug described below.
690 Fix bug where some threads would be missing from large search results
692 When a search returned a "large" number of results, the emacs
693 interface was incorrectly dropping one thread every time the output
694 of the "notmuch search" process spanned the emacs read-buffer. This
697 Avoid re-compression of .gz files (and similar) when saving attachment
699 Emacs was being too clever for its own good and trying to
700 re-compress pre-compressed .gz files when saving such attachments
701 (potentially corrupting the attachment). The emacs interface is
702 fixed to avoid this bug.
704 Fix hiding of a message when a previously-hidden citation is visible
706 Previously the citation would remain visible in this case. This is
707 fixed so that hiding a message hides all parts.
709 Notmuch 0.5 (2010-11-11)
710 ========================
711 New, general features
712 ---------------------
713 Maildir-flag synchronization
715 Notmuch now knows how to synchronize flags in maildir filenames with
716 tags in the notmuch database. The following flag/tag mappings are
725 'S' unread (added when 'S' flag is not present)
727 The synchronization occurs in both directions, (for example, adding
728 the 'S' flag to a file will cause the "unread" tag to be added, and
729 adding the "replied" tag to a message will cause the file to be
730 renamed with an 'R' flag).
732 This synchronization is enabled by default for users of the
733 command-line interface, (though only files in directories named
734 "cur" or "new" will be renamed). It can be disabled by setting the
735 new maildir.synchronize_flags option in the configuration file. For
738 notmuch config set maildir.synchronize_flags false
740 Users upgrading may also want to run "notmuch setup" once (just
741 accept the existing configuration) to get a new, nicely-commented
742 [maildir] section added to the configuration file.
744 For users of the notmuch library, the new synchronization
745 functionality is available with the following two new functions:
747 notmuch_message_maildir_flags_to_tags
748 notmuch_message_tags_to_maildir_flags
750 It is anticipated that future improvements to this support will
751 allow for safe synchronization of the 'T' flag with the "deleted"
752 tag, as well as support for custom flag/tag mappings.
756 Support for querying multiple filenames for a single message
758 It is common for the mailstore to contain multiple files with the
759 same message ID. Previously, notmuch would always hide these
760 duplicate files, (returning a single, arbitrary filename with
761 notmuch_message_get_filename).
763 With this release, library users can access all filenames for a
764 message with the new function:
766 notmuch_message_get_filenames
768 Together with notmuch_filenames_valid, notmuch_filenames_get, and
769 notmuch_filenames_move_to_next it is now possible to iterate over
770 all available filenames for a given message.
772 New command-line features
773 -------------------------
774 New "notmuch show --format=raw" for getting at original email contents
776 This new feature allows for a fully-functional email client to be
777 built on top of the notmuch command-line without needing any direct
778 access to the mail store itself.
780 For example, it's now possible to run "emacs -f notmuch" on a local
781 machine with only ssh access to the mail store/notmuch database. To
782 do this, simply set the notmuch-command variable in emacs to the
783 name of a script containing:
785 ssh user@host notmuch "$@"
787 If the ssh client has enabled connection sharing (ControlMaster
788 option in OpenSSH), the emacs interface can be quite responsive this
793 Fix "notmuch search" to print nothing when nothing matches
795 The 0.4 release had a bug in which:
797 notmuch search <expression-with-no-matches>
799 would produce a single blank line of output, (where previous
800 versions would produce no output. This fix also causes a change in
801 the --format=json output, (which would previously produce "[]" and
802 now produces nothing).
804 Emacs interface improvements
805 ----------------------------
806 Fix to allow pipe ('|') command to work when using notmuch over ssh
808 Fix count of lines in hidden signatures.
810 Omit repeated subject lines in (collapsed) thread display.
812 Display current thread subject in a header line.
814 Provide a "c i" binding to copy a thread ID from the search view.
816 Allow for notmuch-fcc-dirs to have a value of nil.
818 Also, the more complex form of notmuch-fcc-dirs now has a slightly
819 different format. It no longer has a special first-element, fallback
820 string. Instead it's now a list of cons cells where the car of each
821 cell is a regular expression to be matched against the sender
822 address, and the cdr is the name of a folder to use for an FCC. So
823 the old fallback behavior can be achieved by including a final cell
824 of (".*" . "default-fcc-folder").
826 Vim interface improvements
827 --------------------------
828 Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface.
830 These include optimizations, support for newer versions of vim, fixed
831 support for sending mail on modern systems, new commands, and
836 Added initial ruby bindings in bindings/ruby
838 Notmuch 0.4 (2010-11-01)
839 ========================
840 New command-line features
841 -------------------------
842 notmuch search --output=(summary|threads|messages|tags|files)
844 This new option allows for particular items to be returned from
845 notmuch searches. The "summary" option is the default and behaves
846 just as "notmuch search" has historically behaved.
848 The new option values allow for thread IDs, message IDs, lists of
849 tags, and lists of filenames to be returned from searches. It is
850 expected that this new option will be very useful in shell
851 scripts. For example:
853 for file in $(notmuch search --output=files <search-terms>); do
854 <operations-on> "$file"
857 notmuch show --format=mbox <search-specification>
859 This new option allows for the messages matching a search
860 specification to be presented as an mbox. Specifically the "mboxrd"
861 format is used which allows for reversible quoting of lines
862 beginning with "From ". A reader should remove a single '>' from the
863 beginning of all lines beginning with one or more '>' characters
864 followed by the 5 characters "From ".
866 notmuch config [get|set] <section>.<item> [value ...]
868 The new top-level "config" command allows for any value in the
869 notmuch configuration file to be queried or set to a new value. Both
870 single-valued and multi-valued items are supported, as our any
871 custom items stored in the configuration file.
873 Avoid setting Bcc header in "notmuch reply"
875 We decided that this was a bit heavy-handed as the actual mail
876 user-agent should be responsible for setting any Bcc option. Also,
877 see below for the notmuch/emacs user-agent now setting an Fcc by
878 default rather than Bcc.
882 Add notmuch_query_get_query_string and notmuch_query_get_sort
884 These are simply functions for querying properties of a
885 notmuch_query_t object.
889 Enable Fcc of all sent messages by default (to "sent" directory)
891 All messages sent from the emacs interface will now be saved to the
892 notmuch mail store where they will be incorporated to the database
893 by the next "notmuch new". By default, messages are saved to the
894 "sent" directory at the top-level of the mail store. This directory
895 can be customized by means of the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" option in the
896 notmuch customize interface.
898 Ability to all open messages in a thread to a pipe
900 Historically, the '|' keybinding allows for piping a single message
901 to an external command. Now, by prefixing this key with a prefix
902 argument, (for example, by pressing "Control-U |"), all open
903 messages in the current thread will be sent to the external command.
905 Optional support for detecting inline patches
907 This hook is disabled by default but can be enabled with a checkbox
908 under "Notmuch Show Insert Text/Plain Hook" in the notmuch customize
909 interface. It allows for inline patches to be detected and treated
910 as if they were attachments, (with context-sensitive highlighting).
912 Automatically tag messages as "replied" when sending a reply
914 Messages replied to within the emacs interface will now be tagged as
915 "replied". This feature can easily be customized to add or remove
916 other tags as well. For example, a user might use a tag of
917 "needs-reply" and can configure this feature to automatically remove
918 that tag when replying. See "Notmuch Message Mark Replied" in the
919 notmuch customize interface.
921 Allow search-result color specifications to overlay each other
923 For example, one tag can specify the background color of matching
924 lines, while another can specify the foreground. With this change,
925 both settings will now be visible simultaneously, (which was not the
926 case in previous releases). See "Notmuch Search Line Faces" in the
927 notmuch customize interface.
929 Make hidden author names still available for incremental search.
931 When there is insufficient space to display all authors of a thread
932 in search results, the names of hidden authors are now still made
933 available to emacs' incremental search commands. As the user
934 searches, matching lines will temporarily expand to show the hidden
937 New binding of Control-TAB (works like TAB in reverse)
939 Many notmuch nodes already use TAB to navigate forward through
940 various items allowing actions, (message headers, email attachments,
941 etc.). The new Control-TAB binding operates similarly but in the
944 New build-system features
945 -------------------------
946 Various portability fixes have been applied
948 These include fixes for build failures on at least Solaris, FreeBSD,
949 and Fedora systems. We're hopeful that the notmuch code base is now
950 more portable than ever before.
952 Arrange for libnotmuch to be found automatically after make install
954 The notmuch build system is now careful to help the user avoid
955 errors of the form "libnotmuch.so could not be found" immediately
956 after installing. This support takes two forms:
958 1. If the library is installed to a system directory,
959 (configured in /etc/ld.so.conf), then "make install" will
960 automatically run ldconfig.
962 2. If the library is installed to a non-system directory, the
963 build system adds a DR_RUNPATH entry to the final binary
964 pointing to the directory to which the library is installed.
966 When this support works, the user should be able to run notmuch
967 immediately after "make install", without any errors trying to find
968 the notmuch library, and without having to manually set environment
969 variables such as LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
971 Check compiler/linker options before using them
973 The configure script now carefully checks that any desired
974 compilation options, (whether for enabling compiler warnings, or for
975 embedding rpath, etc.), are supported. Only supported options are
976 used in the resulting Makefile.
978 New test-suite features
979 -----------------------
980 New modularization of test suite.
982 Thanks to a gracious relicensing of the test-suite infrastructure
983 from the git project, notmuch now has a modular test suite. This
984 provides the ability to run individual sections of the test suite
985 rather than the whole things. It also provides better summary of
986 test results, with support for tests that are expected to fail
987 (BROKEN and FIXED) in addition to PASS and FAIL. Finally, it makes
988 it easy to run the test suite within valgrind (pass --valgrind to
989 notmuch-test or to any sub-script) which has been very useful.
991 New testing of emacs interface.
993 The test suite has been augmented to allow automated testing of the
994 emacs interfaces. So far, this includes basic searches, display of
995 threads, and tag manipulation. This also includes a test that a new
996 message can successfully be sent out through a (dummy) SMTP server
997 and that said message is successfully integrated into the notmuch
998 database via the FCC setting.
1002 Fix potential corruption of database when "notmuch new " is interrupted.
1004 Previously, an interruption of "notmuch new" would (rarely) result
1005 in a corrupt database. The corruption would manifest itself by a
1006 persistent error of the form:
1008 document ID of 1234 has no thread ID
1010 The message-adding code has been carefully audited and reworked to
1011 avoid this sort of corruption regardless of when it is interrupted.
1013 Fix failure with extremely long message ID headers.
1015 Previously, a message with an extremely long message ID, (say, more
1016 than 300 characters), would fail to be added to notmuch, (triggering
1017 Xapian exceptions). This has now been fixed.
1019 Fix for messages with "charset=unknown-8bit"
1021 Previously, messages with this charset would cause notmuch to emit a
1022 GMime warning, (which would then trip up emacs or other interfaces
1023 parsing the notmuch results).
1025 Fix notmuch_query_search_threads function to return NULL on any exception
1027 Fix "notmuch search" to return non-zero if notmuch_query_search_threads fails
1029 Previously, this command could confusingly report a Xapian
1030 exception, yet still return an error code of 0. It now correctly
1031 returns a failing error code of 1 in this case.
1035 Fix to handle a message with a subject containing, for example "[1234]"
1037 Previously, a message subject containing a sequence of digits within
1038 square brackets would cause the emacs interface to mis-parse the
1039 output of "notmuch search". This would result in the message being
1040 mis-displayed and prevent the user from manipulating the message in
1041 the emacs interface.
1043 Fix to correctly handle message IDs containing ".."
1045 The emacs interface now properly quotes message IDs to avoid a
1046 Xapian bug in which the ".." within a message ID would be
1047 misinterpreted as a numeric range specification.
1049 Python-binding fixes
1050 --------------------
1051 The python bindings for notmuch have been updated to work with python3.
1053 Debian-specific fixes
1054 ---------------------
1055 Fix emacs initialization so "M-x notmuch" works for users by default.
1057 Now, a new Debian user can immediately run "emacs -f notmuch" after
1058 "apt-get install notmuch". Previously, the user would have had to
1059 edit the ~/.emacs file to add "(require 'notmuch)" before this would
1062 Notmuch 0.3.1 (2010-04-27)
1063 ==========================
1066 Fix an infinite loop in "notmuch reply"
1068 This bug could be triggered by replying to a message where the
1069 user's primary email address did not appear in the To: header and
1070 the user had not configured any secondary email addresses. The bug
1071 was a simple re-use of the same iterator variable in nested loops.
1073 Fix a potential SEGV in "notmuch search"
1075 This bug could be triggered by an author name ending in a ','.
1076 Admittedly - that's almost certainly a spam email, but we never
1077 want notmuch to crash.
1081 Fix calculations for line wrapping in the primary "notmuch" view.
1083 Fix Fcc support to prompt to create a directory if the specified Fcc
1084 directory does not exist.
1088 Fix build on OpenSolaris (at least) due to missing 'extern "C"' block.
1090 Without this, the C++ sources could not find strcasestr and the
1091 final linking of notmuch would fail.
1093 Notmuch 0.3 (2010-04-27)
1094 ========================
1095 New command-line features
1096 -------------------------
1097 User-configurable tags for new messages
1099 A new "new.tags" option is available in the configuration file to
1100 determine which tags are applied to new messages. Run "notmuch
1101 setup" to generate new documentation within ~/.notmuch-config on how
1102 to specify this value.
1104 Threads search results named based on subjects that match search
1106 This means that when new mails arrived to a thread you've previously
1107 read, and the new mails have a new subject, you will see that
1108 subject in the search results rather than the old subject.
1110 Faster operation of "notmuch tag" (avoid unneeded sorting)
1112 Since the user just wants to tag all matching messages, we can make
1113 things perform a bit faster by avoiding the sort.
1115 Even Better guessing of From: header for "notmuch reply"
1117 Notmuch now looks at a number of headers when trying to figure out
1118 the best From: header to use in a reply. This is helpful if you have
1119 several configured email addresses, and you also subscribe to various
1120 mailing lists with different addresses, (so that mails you are
1121 replying to won't always include your subscribed address in the To:
1124 Indication of author names that match a search
1126 When notmuch displays threads as the result of a search, it now
1127 lists the authors that match the search before listing the other
1128 authors in the thread. It inserts a pipe '|' symbol between the last
1129 matching and first non-matching author. This is especially useful in
1130 a search that includes tag:unread. Now the authors of the unread
1131 messages in the thread are listed first.
1133 New: Python bindings
1134 --------------------
1135 Sebastian Spaeth has contributed his python bindings for the notmuch
1136 library to the central repository. These bindings were previously
1137 known as "cnotmuch" within python but have now been renamed to be
1138 accessible with a simple, and more official-looking "import notmuch".
1140 The bindings have already proven very useful as people proficient in
1141 python have been able to easily develop programs to do notmuch-based
1142 searches for email-address completion, maildir-flag synchronization,
1145 These bindings are available within the bindings/python directory, but
1146 are not yet integrated into the top-level Makefiles, nor the top-level
1147 package-building scripts. Improvements are welcome.
1149 Emacs interface improvements
1150 ----------------------------
1151 An entirely new initial view for notmuch, (friendly yet powerful)
1153 Some of us call the new view "notmuch hello" but you can get at it
1154 by simply calling "emacs -f notmuch". The new view provides a search
1155 bar where new searches can be performed. It also displays a list of
1156 recent searches, along with a button to save any of these, giving it
1157 a new name as a "saved search". Many people find these "saved
1158 searches" one of the most convenient ways of organizing their mail,
1159 (providing all of the features of "folders" in other mail clients,
1160 but without any of the disadvantages).
1162 Finally, this view can also optionally display all of the tags that
1163 exist in the database, along with a count for each tag, and a custom
1164 search of messages with that tag that's simply a click (or keypress)
1167 Note: For users that liked the original mode of "emacs -f notmuch"
1168 immediately displaying a particular search result, we
1169 recommend instead running something like:
1171 emacs --eval '(notmuch search "tag:inbox" t)'
1173 The "t" means to sort the messages in an "oldest first" order,
1174 (as notmuch would do previously by default). You can also
1175 leave that off to have your search results in "newest first"
1178 Full-featured "customize" support for configuring notmuch
1180 Notmuch now plugs in well to the emacs "customize" mode to make it
1181 much simpler to find things about the notmuch interface that can be
1182 tweaked by the user.
1184 You can get to this mode by starting at the main "Customize" menu in
1185 emacs, then browsing through "Applications", "Mail", and
1186 "Notmuch". Or you can go straight to "M-x customize-group"
1189 Once you're at the customize screen, you'll see a list of documented
1190 options that can be manipulated along with checkboxes, drop-down
1191 selectors, and text-entry boxes for configuring the various
1194 Support for doing tab-completion of email addresses
1196 This support currently relies on an external program,
1197 (notmuch-addresses), that is not yet shipped with notmuch
1198 itself. But multiple, suitable implementations of this program have
1199 already been written that generate address completions by doing
1200 notmuch searches of your email collection. For example, providing
1201 first those addresses that you have composed messages to in the
1204 One such program (implemented in python with the python bindings to
1205 notmuch) is available via:
1207 git clone http://jkr.acm.jhu.edu/git/notmuch_addresses.git
1209 Install that program as notmuch-addresses on your PATH, and then
1210 hitting TAB on a partial email address or name within the To: or Cc:
1211 line of an email message will provide matching completions.
1213 Support for file-based (Fcc) delivery of sent messages to mail store
1215 This isn't yet enabled by default. To enable this, one will have to
1216 set the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" setting within the notmuch customize
1217 screen, (see its documentation there for details). We anticipate
1218 making this automatic in a future release.
1220 New 'G' key binding to trigger mail refresh (G == "Get new mail")
1222 The 'G' key works wherever '=' works. Before refreshing the screen
1223 it calls an external program that can be used to poll email servers,
1224 run notmuch new and setup specific tags for the new emails. The
1225 script to be called should be configured with the "Notmuch Poll
1226 Script" setting in the customize interface. This script will
1227 typically invoke "notmuch new" and then perhaps several "notmuch
1230 Implement emacs message display with the JSON output from notmuch.
1232 This is much more robust than the previous implementation, (where
1233 some HTML mails and mail quoting the notmuch code with the delimiter
1234 characters in it would cause the parser to fall over).
1236 Better handling of HTML messages and MIME attachments (inline images!)
1238 Allow for any MIME parts that emacs can display to be displayed
1239 inline. This includes inline viewing of image attachments, (provided
1240 the window is large enough to fit the image at its natural size).
1242 Much more robust handling of HTML messages. Currently both text/plain
1243 and text/html alternates will be rendered next to each other. In a
1244 future release, users will be able to decide to see only one or the
1245 other representation.
1247 Each attachment now has its own button so that attachments can be
1248 saved individually (the 'w' key is still available to save all
1251 Customizable support for tidying of text/plain message content
1253 Many new functions are available for tidying up message
1254 content. These include options such as wrapping long lines,
1255 compressing duplicate blank lines, etc.
1257 Most of these are disabled by default, but can easily be enabled by
1258 clicking the available check boxes under the "Notmuch Show Insert
1259 Text/Plain Hook" within the notmuch customize screen.
1261 New support for searchable citations (even when hidden)
1263 When portions of overly-long citations are hidden, the contents of
1264 these citations will still be available for emacs' standard
1265 "incremental search" functions. When the search matches any portion
1266 of a hidden citation, the citation will become visible temporarily
1267 to display the search result.
1269 More flexible handling of header visibility
1271 As an answer to complaints from many users, the To, Cc, and Date
1272 headers of messages are no longer hidden by default. For those users
1273 that liked that these were hidden, a new "Notmuch Messages Headers
1274 Visible" option in the customize interface can be set to nil. The
1275 visibility of headers can still be toggled on a per-message basis
1276 with the 'h' keybinding.
1278 For users that don't want to see some subset of those headers, the
1279 new "Notmuch Message Headers" variable can be customized to list
1280 only those headers that should be present in the display of a message.
1282 The Return key now toggles message visibility anywhere
1284 Previously this worked only on the first summary-line of a message.
1286 Customizable formatting of search results
1288 The user can easily customize the order, width, and formatting of
1289 the various fields in a "notmuch search" buffer. See the "Notmuch
1290 Search Result Format" section of the customize interface.
1292 Generate nicer names for search buffers when using a saved search.
1294 Add a notmuch User-Agent header when sending mail from notmuch/emacs.
1296 New keybinding (M-Ret) to open all collapsed messages in a thread.
1300 Provide a new NOTMUCH_SORT_UNSORTED value for queries
1302 This can be somewhat faster when sorting simply isn't desired. For
1303 example when collecting a set of messages that will all be
1304 manipulated identically, (adding a tag, removing a tag, deleting the
1305 messages), then there's no advantage to sorting the messages by
1310 Fix to compile against GMime 2.6
1312 Previously notmuch insisted on being able to find GMime 2.4, (even
1313 though GMime 2.6 would have worked all along).
1315 Fix configure script to accept (and ignore) various standard options.
1317 For example, those that the Gentoo build scripts expect configure to
1318 accept are now all accepted.
1322 A large number of new tests for the many new features.
1324 Better display of output from failed tests.
1326 Now shows failures with diff rather than forcing the user to gaze at
1327 complete actual and expected output looking for deviation.
1329 Notmuch 0.2 (2010-04-16)
1330 ========================
1331 This is the second release of the notmuch mail system, with actual
1332 detailed release notes this time!
1334 This release consists of a number of minor new features that make
1335 notmuch more pleasant to use, and a few fairly major bug fixes.
1337 We didn't quite hit our release target of "about a week" from the 0.1
1338 release, (0.2 is happening 11 days after 0.1), but we hope to do
1339 better for next week. Look forward to some major features coming to
1340 notmuch in subsequent releases.
1346 Better guessing of From: header.
1348 Notmuch now tries harder to guess which configured address should be
1349 used as the From: line in a "notmuch reply". It will examine the
1350 Received: headers if it fails to find any configured address in To:
1351 or Cc:. This allows it to often choose the correct address even when
1352 replying to a message sent to a mailing list, and not directly to a
1355 Make "notmuch count" with no arguments count all messages
1357 Previously, it was hard to construct a search term that was
1358 guaranteed to match all messages.
1360 Provide a new special-case search term of "*" to match all messages.
1362 This can be used in any command accepting a search term, such as
1363 "notmuch search '*'". Note that you'll want to take care that the
1364 shell doesn't expand * against the current files. And note that the
1365 support for "*" is a special case. It's only meaningful as a single
1366 search term and loses its special meaning when combined with any
1369 Automatically detect thread connections even when a parent message is
1372 Previously, if two or more message were received with a common
1373 parent, but that parent was not received, then these messages would
1374 not be recognized as belonging to the same thread. This is now fixed
1375 so that such messages are properly connected in a thread.
1379 Fix potential data loss in "notmuch new" with SIGINT
1381 One code path in "notmuch new" was not properly handling
1382 SIGINT. Previously, this could lead to messages being removed from
1383 the database (and their tags being lost) if the user pressed
1384 Control-C while "notmuch new" was working.
1386 Fix segfault when a message includes a MIME part that is empty.
1388 Fix handling of non-ASCII characters with --format=json
1390 Previously, characters outside the range of 7-bit ASCII were
1391 silently dropped from the JSON output. This led to corrupted display
1392 of utf-8 content in the upcoming notmuch web-based frontends.
1394 Fix headers to be properly decoded in "notmuch reply"
1396 Previously, the user might see:
1398 Subject: Re: =?iso-8859-2?q?Rozlu=E8ka?=
1402 Subject: Re: Rozlučka
1404 The former text is properly encoded to be RFC-compliant SMTP, will
1405 be sent correctly, and will be properly decoded by the
1406 recipient. But the user trying to edit the reply would likely be
1407 unable to read or edit that field in its encoded form.
1409 Emacs client features
1410 ---------------------
1411 Show the last few lines of citations as well as the first few lines.
1413 It's often the case that the last sentence of a citation is what is
1414 being replied to directly, so the last few lines are often much more
1415 important. The number of lines shown at the beginning and end of any
1416 citation can be configured, (notmuch-show-citation-lines-prefix and
1417 notmuch-show-citation-lines-suffix).
1419 The '+' and '-' commands in the search view can now add and remove
1422 Selective bulk tagging is now possible by selecting a region of
1423 threads and then using either the '+' or '-' keybindings. Bulk
1424 tagging is still available for all threads matching the current
1425 search with the '*' binding.
1427 More meaningful buffer names for thread-view buffers.
1429 Notmuch now uses the Subject of the thread as the buffer
1430 name. Previously it was using the thread ID, which is a meaningless
1433 Provide for customized colors of threads in search view based on tags.
1435 See the documentation of notmuch-search-line-faces, (or us "M-x
1436 customize" and browse to the "notmuch" group within "Applications"
1437 and "Mail"), for details on how to configure this colorization.
1439 Build-system features
1440 ---------------------
1441 Add support to properly build libnotmuch on Darwin systems (OS X).
1443 Add support to configure for many standard options.
1445 We include actual support for:
1447 --includedir --mandir --sysconfdir
1449 And accept and silently ignore several more:
1451 --build --infodir --libexecdir --localstatedir
1452 --disable-maintainer-mode --disable-dependency-tracking
1454 Install emacs client in "make install" rather than requiring a
1455 separate "make install-emacs".
1457 Automatically compute versions numbers between releases.
1459 This support uses the git-describe notation, so a version such as
1460 0.1-144-g43cbbfc indicates a version that is 144 commits since the
1461 0.1 release and is available as git commit "43cbbfc".
1463 Add a new "make test" target to run the test suite and actually verify
1466 Notmuch 0.1 (2010-04-05)
1467 ========================
1468 This is the first release of the notmuch mail system.
1470 It includes the libnotmuch library, the notmuch command-line
1471 interface, and an emacs-based interface to notmuch.
1473 Note: Notmuch will work best with Xapian 1.0.18 (or later) or Xapian
1474 1.1.4 (or later). Previous versions of Xapian (whether 1.0 or 1.1) had
1475 a performance bug that made notmuch very slow when modifying
1476 tags. This would cause distracting pauses when reading mail while
1477 notmuch would wait for Xapian when removing the "inbox" and "unread"
1478 tags from messages in a thread.