1 Notmuch 0.10 (2011-xx-xx)
2 =========================
4 New build and testing features
5 ------------------------------
7 Emacs tests are now done in dtach. This means that dtach is now
8 needed to run the notmuch test suite, at least until the checking for
9 prerequisites is improved.
11 New command-line features
12 -------------------------
14 Add "notmuch restore --accumulate" option
16 The --accumulate switch causes the union of the existing and new tags to be
17 applied, instead of replacing each message's tags as they are read in from
20 Add search terms to "notmuch dump"
22 The dump command now takes an optional search term much like notmuch
23 search/show/tag. The output file argument of dump is deprecated in
24 favour of using stdout.
26 Add "notmuch search" --offset and --limit options
28 The search command now takes options --offset=[-]N and --limit=N to limit
29 the number of results shown.
31 Add "notmuch count --output" option
33 The count command is now capable of counting threads in addition to
34 messages. This is selected using the new --output=(threads|messages) option.
39 Add tab-completion for notmuch-search and notmuch-search-filter
41 These functions now support completion tags for query parts
44 Turn "id:MSG-ID" links into buttons associated with notmuch searches
46 Text of the form "id:MSG-ID" in mails is now a clickable button that
47 opens a notmuch search for the given message id.
52 Emacs now constructs large search buffers more efficiently
54 Search avoids opening and parsing message files
56 We now store more information in the database so search no longer
57 has to open every message file to get basic headers. This can
58 improve search speed by as much as 10X, but taking advantage of this
59 requires a database rebuild:
61 notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
62 # Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
64 notmuch restore notmuch.dump
66 New collection of add-on tools
67 ------------------------------
69 The source directory "contrib" contains tools built on notmuch. These
70 tools are not part of notmuch, and you should check their individual
71 licenses. Feel free to report problems with them to the notmuch
74 nmbug - share tags with a given prefix
76 nmbug helps maintain a git repo containing all tags with a given
77 prefix (by default "notmuch::"). Tags can be shared by commiting
78 them to git in one location and restoring in another.
80 Notmuch 0.9 (2011-10-01)
81 ========================
86 Correct handling of interruptions during "notmuch new"
88 "notmuch new" now operates as a series of small, self-consistent
89 transactions, so it can correctly resume after an interruption or
90 crash. Previously, interruption could lose existing tags, fail to
91 detect messages on resume, or leave the database in a state
92 temporarily or permanently inconsistent with the mail store.
99 notmuch_database_begin_atomic and notmuch_database_end_atomic allow
100 multiple database operations to be performed atomically.
101 notmuch_database_find_message_by_filename does exactly what it says.
105 notmuch_database_find_message (and n_d_f_m_by_filename) now return
106 a status indicator and uses an output parameter for the
107 message. This change required changing the SONAME of libnotmuch to
110 Python bindings changes
111 -----------------------
113 - Re-encode python unicode objects to utf-8 before passing back to
115 - Support Database().begin_atomic()/end_atomic()
116 - Support Database().find_message_by_filename()
117 NB! This needs a db opened in READ-WRITE mode currently, or it will crash
118 the python process. The is a limitation (=bug) of the underlying libnotmuch.
119 - Fixes where we would not throw NotmuchErrors when we should (Justus Winter)
120 - Update for n_d_find_message* API changes (see above).
122 Ruby bindings changes
123 ---------------------
125 - Wrap new library functions notmuch_database_{begin,end}_atomic.
126 - Add new exception Notmuch::UnbalancedAtomicError.
127 - Rename destroy to destroy! according to Ruby naming conventions.
128 - Update for n_d_find_message* API changes (see above).
133 * Add gpg callback to crypto sigstatus buttons to retrieve/refresh
135 * Add notmuch-show-refresh-view function (and corresponding binding)
136 to refresh the view of a notmuch-show buffer.
138 Reply formatting cleanup
139 ------------------------
141 "notmuch reply" no longer includes notification that non-leafnode
142 MIME parts are being suppressed.
144 Notmuch 0.8 (2011-09-10)
145 ========================
147 Improved handling of message/rfc822 parts
149 Both in the CLI and the emacs interface. Output of rfc822 parts now
150 includes the primary headers, as well as the body and all subparts.
151 Output of the completely raw rfc822-formatted message, including all
152 headers, is unfortunately not yet supported (but hopefully will be
155 Improved Build system portability
157 Certain parts of the shell script generating notmuch.sym were
158 specific to the GNU versions of sed and nm. The new version should
159 be more portable to e.g. OpenBSD.
161 Documentation update for Ruby bindings
163 Added documentation, typo fixes, and improved support for rdoc.
165 Unicode, iterator, PEP8 changes for python bindings
167 - PEP8 (code formatting) changes for python files.
168 - Remove Tags.__len__ ; see 0.6 release notes for motivation.
169 - Decode headers as UTF8, encode (unicode) database paths as UTF8.
171 Notmuch 0.7 (2011-08-01)
172 ========================
174 Vim interface improvements
175 --------------------------
177 Jason Woofenden provided a number of bug fixes for the Vim interface
179 * fix citation/signature fold lengths
180 * fix cig/cit parsing within multipart/*
181 * fix on-screen instructions for show-signature
182 * fix from list reformatting in search view
183 * fix space key: now archives (did opposite)
185 Uwe Kleine-König contributed
187 * use full path for sendmail/doc fix
188 * fix compose temp file name
190 Python Bindings changes
191 -----------------------
193 Sebastian Spaeth contributed two changes related to unicode and UTF8:
195 * message tags are now explicitly unicode
196 * query string is encoded as a UTF8 byte string
198 Build-System improvments
199 ------------------------
201 Generate notmuch.sym after the relevant object files
203 This fixes a bug in parallel building. Thanks to Thomas Jost for the
206 Notmuch 0.6.1 (2011-07-17)
207 ==========================
212 Re-export Xapian exception typeinfo symbols.
214 It turned out our aggressive symbol hiding caused problems for
215 people running gcc 4.4.5.
217 Notmuch 0.6 (2011-07-01)
218 =======================
219 New, general features
220 ---------------------
221 Folder-based searching
223 Notmuch queries can now include a search term to match the
224 directories in which mail files are stored (within the mail
225 storage). The syntax is as follows:
229 For example, one might use things such as:
235 to match any path containing a directory "spam", "work/todo", or
236 containing a directory starting with "2011-", respectively.
238 This feature is particularly useful for users of delivery-agent
239 software (such as procmail or maildrop) that is filtering mail and
240 delivering it to particular folders, or users of systems such as
241 Gmail that use filesystem directories to indicate message tags.
243 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
244 notmuch will be searchable with folder: terms. In order to enable
245 this feature for all mail, the entire notmuch index will need to be
248 notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
249 # Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
251 notmuch restore notmuch.dump
255 Both the command line interface and the emacs-interface have new
256 support for PGP/MIME, detailed below. Thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor
257 and Jameson Graef Rollins for making this happen.
259 New, automatic tags: "signed" and "encrypted"
261 These tags will automatically be applied to messages containing
262 multipart/signed and multipart/encrypted parts.
264 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
265 notmuch will receive these tags.
267 New command-line features
268 -------------------------
269 Add new "notmuch show --verify" option for signature verification
271 This option instruct notmuch to verify the signature of
272 PGP/MIME-signed parts.
274 Add new "notmuch show --decrypt" and "notmuch reply --decrypt" options
276 This option instructs notmuch to decrypt PGP/MIME-encrypted parts.
277 Note that this feature currently requires gpg-agent and a passphrase entry
278 tool (e.g. pinentry-gtk or pinentry-curses).
280 Proper nesting of multipart parts in "notmuch show" output
282 MIME parts are now display with proper nesting to reflect original
283 MIME hierarchy of a message. This allows clients to correctly
284 analyze the MIME structure, (such as, for example, determining to
285 which parts a signature part applies).
287 Add new "notmuch show --part" option
289 This is a replacement for the older "notmuch part" command, (which
290 is now deprecated—it should still work as always, but is no longer
291 documented). Putting part output under "notmuch show" allows for all
292 of the "notmuch show" options to be applied when extracting a single
293 part, (such as --format=json for extracting a message part with JSON
296 Deprecate "notmuch search-tags", (in favor of "notmuch search --output=tags *")
298 The "notmuch search-tags" sub-command has been redundant since the
299 addition of the --output=tags option to "notmuch search". We now
300 make that more clear by deprecating "notmuch search-tags", (dropping
301 it from the documentation). We do continue to support the old syntax
302 by translating it internally to the new call.
304 Performance improvements
305 ------------------------
306 Faster searches (by doing fewer searches to construct threads)
308 Whenever a user asks for search results as threads, notmuch first
309 performs a search for messages matching the query, then performs
310 additional searches to find other messages in the resulting threads.
312 Removing inefficiencies and redundancies in these secondary searches
313 results in a measured speedups of 1.5x for a typical search.
315 Faster searches (by doing fewer passes to gather message data)
317 Optimizing Xapian data access patterns (using a single pass to get
318 all message-document data rather than a pass for each data type)
319 results in a measured speedup of 1.7x for a typical search.
321 The benefits of this optimization combine with the preceding
322 optimization. With both in place, Austin Clements measured a speedup
323 of 2.5x for a search of all messages in his inbox (was 4.5s, now
324 1.8s). Thanks, Austin!
326 Faster initial indexing
328 More efficient indexing of new messages results in a measured
329 speedup of 1.4x for the initial indexing of 3 GB of mail (1h 14m
330 rather than 1h 46m). Thanks to Austin Clements and Michal Sojka.
332 Make "notmuch new" faster for unchanged directories
334 Optimizing to not do any further examinations of sub-directories
335 when the filesystem indicates that a directory is unchanged from the
336 last "notmuch new" results in measured speedups of 8.5 for the "No
337 new mail" case, (was 0.77s, now 0.09s). Thanks to Karel Zak.
339 New emacs-interface features
340 ----------------------------
342 Support for PGP/MIME (GnuPG)
344 Automatically indicate validity of signatures for multipart/signed
345 messages. Automatically display decrypted content for
346 multipart/encrypted messages. See the emacs variable
347 notmuch-crypto-process-mime for more information. Note that this
348 needs gpg-agent and a pinentry tool just as the command line tools.
349 Also note there is no support SMIME yet.
351 Output of pipe command is now displayed if pipe command fails
353 This is extremely useful in the common use case of piping a patch to
354 "git am". If git fails to cleanly merge the patch the error messages
355 from the failed merge are now clearly displayed to the user, (where
356 previously they were silently hidden from the user).
358 User-selectable From address
360 A user can choose which configured email addresses should be used as
361 the From address whenever composing a new message. To do so, simply
362 press C-u before the command which will open a new message. Emacs
363 will prompt for the from address to use.
365 The user can customize the "Notmuch Identities" setting in the
366 notmuch customize group in order to use addresses other than those in
367 the notmuch configuration file if desired.
369 The user can also choose to always be prompted for the from address
370 when composing a new message (without having to use C-u) by setting
371 the "Notmuch Always Prompt For Sender" option in the notmuch
374 Hiding of repeated subjects in collapsed thread view
376 In notmuch-show mode, if a collapsed message has the same subject as
377 its parent, the subject is not shown.
379 Automatic detection and hiding of original message in top-posted message
381 When a message contains a line looking something like:
383 ----- Original Message -----
385 emacs hides this and all subsequent lines as an "original message",
386 (allowing the user to click or press enter on the "original message"
387 button to display it again). This makes the handling of top-posted
388 citations work much like conventional citations.
390 New hooks for running code when tags are modified
392 Some users want to perform additional actions whenever a particular
393 tag is added/removed from a message. This could be used to, for
394 example, interface with some external spam-recognition training
395 tool. To facilitate this, two new hooks are added which can be
396 modified in the following settings of the notmuch customize group:
398 Notmuch Before Tag Hook
399 Notmuch After Tag Hook
401 New optional support for hiding some multipart/alternative parts
403 Many emails are sent with redundant content within a
404 multipart/alternative group (such as a text/plain part as well as a
405 text/html part). Users can configure the setting:
407 Notmuch Show All Multipart/Alternative Parts
409 to "off" in the notmuch customize group to have the interface
410 automatically hide some part alternatives (such as text/html
411 parts). This new part hiding is not configured by default yet
412 because there's not yet a simple way to re-display such a hidden
413 part if it is not actually redundant with a displayed part.
415 Better rendering of text/x-vcalendar parts
417 These parts are now displayed in a format suitable for use with the
420 Avoid getting confused by Subject and Author fields with newline characters
422 Replacing all characters with ASCII code less than 32 with a question mark.
424 Cleaner display of From line in email messages (remove double quotes,
425 and drop "name" if it's actually just a repeat of the email address).
427 Vim interface improvements
428 --------------------------
429 Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface:
431 * Using sendmail directly rather than mailx,
432 * Implementing archive in show view
433 * Add support to mark as read in show and search views
434 * Add delete commands
437 Bindings improvements
438 ---------------------
439 Ruby bindings are now much more complete
441 Including QUERY.sort, QUERY.to_s, MESSAGE.maildir_flags_to_tags,
442 MESSAGE.tags_to_maildir_flags, and MESSAGE.get_filenames
444 * Python bindings have been upodated and extended
445 (docs online at http://packages.python.org/notmuch/)
448 - Message().get_filenames(),
449 - Message().tags_to_maildir_flags(),Message().maildir_flags_to_tags()
450 - list(Threads()) and list(Messages) works now
452 - Message().__cmp__() and __hash__()
453 These allow, for example:
456 As well as set arithmetic on Messages():
458 s1, s2= set(msgs1), set(msgs2)
463 - len(Messages()) as it exausted the iterator.
464 Use len(list(Messages())) or
465 Query.count_messages() to get the length.
467 Added initial Go bindings in bindings/go
469 New build-system features
470 -------------------------
471 Added support for building in a directory other than the source directory
473 This can be used with the widely-supported idiom of simply running
474 the configure script from some other directory:
481 Fix to save configure options for future, implicit runs of configure
483 When a user updates the source (such as with "git pull") calling
484 "make" may cause an automatic re-run of the configure script. When
485 this happens, the configure script will automatically be called with
486 the same options the user originally passed in the most-recent
487 manual invocation of configure.
489 New test-suite feature
490 ----------------------
491 Binary for bash for running test suite now located via PATH.
493 The notmuch test suite requires a fairly recent version of bash (>=
494 bash 4). As some systems supply an older version of bash at
495 /bin/bash, the test suite is now updated to search $PATH to locate
496 the bash binary. This allows users of systems with old /bin/bash to
497 simply install bash >= 4 somewhere on $PATH before /bin and then use
500 Support for testing output with a trailing newline.
502 Previously, some tests would fail to notice a difference in the
503 presence/absence of a trailing newline in a program output, (which
504 has led to bugs in the past). Now, carefully-written tests (using
505 test_expect_equal_file rather than test_expect_equal) will detect
506 any change in the presence/absence of a trailing newline. Many tests
507 are updated to take advantage of this.
509 Avoiding accessing user's $HOME while running test suite
511 The test suite now carefully creates its own HOME directory. This
512 allows the test suite to be run with no existing HOME directory, (as
513 some build systems apparently do), and avoids test-suite differences
514 due to configuration files in the users HOME directory.
519 Output *all* files for "notmuch search --output=files"
521 For the cases where multiple files have the same Message ID,
522 previous versions of notmuch would output only one such file. This
523 command is now fixed to correctly output all files.
525 Fixed spurious search results from "overlapped" indexing of addresses
527 This fixed a bug where a search for:
529 to:user@elsewhere.com
531 would incorrectly match a message sent:
533 To: user@example,com, someone@elsewhere.com
535 Fix --output=json when search has no results
537 A bug present since notmuch 0.4 had caused searches with no results
538 to produce an invalid json object. This is now fixed to cleanly
539 return a valid json object representing an empty array "[]" as
542 fix the automatic detection of the From address for "notmuch reply"
543 from the Received headers in some cases.
545 Fix core dump on DragonFlyBSD due to -1 return value from
546 sysconf(_SC_GETPW_R_SIZE_MAX).
548 Cleaned up several memory leaks
550 Eliminated a few, rare segmentation faults and a double-free.
552 Fix libnotmuch library to only export notmuch API functions
554 Previous release of the notmuch library also exported some Xapian
555 C++ exception type symbols. These were never part of the library
556 interface and were never intended to be exported.
558 Emacs-interface bug fixes
559 -------------------------
560 Display any unexpected output or errors from "notmuch search" invocations
562 Previously any misformatted output or trailing error messages were
563 silently ignored. This output is now clearly displayed. This fix was
564 very helpful in identifying and fixing the bug described below.
566 Fix bug where some threads would be missing from large search results
568 When a search returned a "large" number of results, the emacs
569 interface was incorrectly dropping one thread every time the output
570 of the "notmuch search" process spanned the emacs read-buffer. This
573 Avoid re-compression of .gz files (and similar) when saving attachment
575 Emacs was being too clever for its own good and trying to
576 re-compress pre-compressed .gz files when saving such attachments
577 (potentially corrupting the attachment). The emacs interface is
578 fixed to avoid this bug.
580 Fix hiding of a message when a previously-hidden citation is visible
582 Previously the citation would remain visible in this case. This is
583 fixed so that hiding a message hides all parts.
585 Notmuch 0.5 (2010-11-11)
586 ========================
587 New, general features
588 ---------------------
589 Maildir-flag synchronization
591 Notmuch now knows how to synchronize flags in maildir filenames with
592 tags in the notmuch database. The following flag/tag mappings are
601 'S' unread (added when 'S' flag is not present)
603 The synchronization occurs in both directions, (for example, adding
604 the 'S' flag to a file will cause the "unread" tag to be added, and
605 adding the "replied" tag to a message will cause the file to be
606 renamed with an 'R' flag).
608 This synchronization is enabled by default for users of the
609 command-line interface, (though only files in directories named
610 "cur" or "new" will be renamed). It can be disabled by setting the
611 new maildir.synchronize_flags option in the configuration file. For
614 notmuch config set maildir.synchronize_flags false
616 Users upgrading may also want to run "notmuch setup" once (just
617 accept the existing configuration) to get a new, nicely-commented
618 [maildir] section added to the configuration file.
620 For users of the notmuch library, the new synchronization
621 functionality is available with the following two new functions:
623 notmuch_message_maildir_flags_to_tags
624 notmuch_message_tags_to_maildir_flags
626 It is anticipated that future improvements to this support will
627 allow for safe synchronization of the 'T' flag with the "deleted"
628 tag, as well as support for custom flag/tag mappings.
632 Support for querying multiple filenames for a single message
634 It is common for the mailstore to contain multiple files with the
635 same message ID. Previously, notmuch would always hide these
636 duplicate files, (returning a single, arbitrary filename with
637 notmuch_message_get_filename).
639 With this release, library users can access all filenames for a
640 message with the new function:
642 notmuch_message_get_filenames
644 Together with notmuch_filenames_valid, notmuch_filenames_get, and
645 notmuch_filenames_move_to_next it is now possible to iterate over
646 all available filenames for a given message.
648 New command-line features
649 -------------------------
650 New "notmuch show --format=raw" for getting at original email contents
652 This new feature allows for a fully-functional email client to be
653 built on top of the notmuch command-line without needing any direct
654 access to the mail store itself.
656 For example, it's now possible to run "emacs -f notmuch" on a local
657 machine with only ssh access to the mail store/notmuch database. To
658 do this, simply set the notmuch-command variable in emacs to the
659 name of a script containing:
661 ssh user@host notmuch "$@"
663 If the ssh client has enabled connection sharing (ControlMaster
664 option in OpenSSH), the emacs interface can be quite responsive this
669 Fix "notmuch search" to print nothing when nothing matches
671 The 0.4 release had a bug in which:
673 notmuch search <expression-with-no-matches>
675 would produce a single blank line of output, (where previous
676 versions would produce no output. This fix also causes a change in
677 the --format=json output, (which would previously produce "[]" and
678 now produces nothing).
680 Emacs interface improvements
681 ----------------------------
682 Fix to allow pipe ('|') command to work when using notmuch over ssh
684 Fix count of lines in hidden signatures.
686 Omit repeated subject lines in (collapsed) thread display.
688 Display current thread subject in a header line.
690 Provide a "c i" binding to copy a thread ID from the search view.
692 Allow for notmuch-fcc-dirs to have a value of nil.
694 Also, the more complex form of notmuch-fcc-dirs now has a slightly
695 different format. It no longer has a special first-element, fallback
696 string. Instead it's now a list of cons cells where the car of each
697 cell is a regular expression to be matched against the sender
698 address, and the cdr is the name of a folder to use for an FCC. So
699 the old fallback behavior can be achieved by including a final cell
700 of (".*" . "default-fcc-folder").
702 Vim interface improvements
703 --------------------------
704 Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface.
706 These include optimizations, support for newer versions of vim, fixed
707 support for sending mail on modern systems, new commands, and
712 Added initial ruby bindings in bindings/ruby
714 Notmuch 0.4 (2010-11-01)
715 ========================
716 New command-line features
717 -------------------------
718 notmuch search --output=(summary|threads|messages|tags|files)
720 This new option allows for particular items to be returned from
721 notmuch searches. The "summary" option is the default and behaves
722 just as "notmuch search" has historically behaved.
724 The new option values allow for thread IDs, message IDs, lists of
725 tags, and lists of filenames to be returned from searches. It is
726 expected that this new option will be very useful in shell
727 scripts. For example:
729 for file in $(notmuch search --output=files <search-terms>); do
730 <operations-on> "$file"
733 notmuch show --format=mbox <search-specification>
735 This new option allows for the messages matching a search
736 specification to be presented as an mbox. Specifically the "mboxrd"
737 format is used which allows for reversible quoting of lines
738 beginning with "From ". A reader should remove a single '>' from the
739 beginning of all lines beginning with one or more '>' characters
740 followed by the 5 characters "From ".
742 notmuch config [get|set] <section>.<item> [value ...]
744 The new top-level "config" command allows for any value in the
745 notmuch configuration file to be queried or set to a new value. Both
746 single-valued and multi-valued items are supported, as our any
747 custom items stored in the configuration file.
749 Avoid setting Bcc header in "notmuch reply"
751 We decided that this was a bit heavy-handed as the actual mail
752 user-agent should be responsible for setting any Bcc option. Also,
753 see below for the notmuch/emacs user-agent now setting an Fcc by
754 default rather than Bcc.
758 Add notmuch_query_get_query_string and notmuch_query_get_sort
760 These are simply functions for querying properties of a
761 notmuch_query_t object.
765 Enable Fcc of all sent messages by default (to "sent" directory)
767 All messages sent from the emacs interface will now be saved to the
768 notmuch mail store where they will be incorporated to the database
769 by the next "notmuch new". By default, messages are saved to the
770 "sent" directory at the top-level of the mail store. This directory
771 can be customized by means of the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" option in the
772 notmuch customize interface.
774 Ability to all open messages in a thread to a pipe
776 Historically, the '|' keybinding allows for piping a single message
777 to an external command. Now, by prefixing this key with a prefix
778 argument, (for example, by pressing "Control-U |"), all open
779 messages in the current thread will be sent to the external command.
781 Optional support for detecting inline patches
783 This hook is disabled by default but can be enabled with a checkbox
784 under "Notmuch Show Insert Text/Plain Hook" in the notmuch customize
785 interface. It allows for inline patches to be detected and treated
786 as if they were attachments, (with context-sensitive highlighting).
788 Automatically tag messages as "replied" when sending a reply
790 Messages replied to within the emacs interface will now be tagged as
791 "replied". This feature can easily be customized to add or remove
792 other tags as well. For example, a user might use a tag of
793 "needs-reply" and can configure this feature to automatically remove
794 that tag when replying. See "Notmuch Message Mark Replied" in the
795 notmuch customize interface.
797 Allow search-result color specifications to overlay each other
799 For example, one tag can specify the background color of matching
800 lines, while another can specify the foreground. With this change,
801 both settings will now be visible simultaneously, (which was not the
802 case in previous releases). See "Notmuch Search Line Faces" in the
803 notmuch customize interface.
805 Make hidden author names still available for incremental search.
807 When there is insufficient space to display all authors of a thread
808 in search results, the names of hidden authors are now still made
809 available to emacs' incremental search commands. As the user
810 searches, matching lines will temporarily expand to show the hidden
813 New binding of Control-TAB (works like TAB in reverse)
815 Many notmuch nodes already use TAB to navigate forward through
816 various items allowing actions, (message headers, email attachments,
817 etc.). The new Control-TAB binding operates similarly but in the
820 New build-system features
821 -------------------------
822 Various portability fixes have been applied
824 These include fixes for build failures on at least Solaris, FreeBSD,
825 and Fedora systems. We're hopeful that the notmuch code base is now
826 more portable than ever before.
828 Arrange for libnotmuch to be found automatically after make install
830 The notmuch build system is now careful to help the user avoid
831 errors of the form "libnotmuch.so could not be found" immediately
832 after installing. This support takes two forms:
834 1. If the library is installed to a system directory,
835 (configured in /etc/ld.so.conf), then "make install" will
836 automatically run ldconfig.
838 2. If the library is installed to a non-system directory, the
839 build system adds a DR_RUNPATH entry to the final binary
840 pointing to the directory to which the library is installed.
842 When this support works, the user should be able to run notmuch
843 immediately after "make install", without any errors trying to find
844 the notmuch library, and without having to manually set environment
845 variables such as LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
847 Check compiler/linker options before using them
849 The configure script now carefully checks that any desired
850 compilation options, (whether for enabling compiler warnings, or for
851 embedding rpath, etc.), are supported. Only supported options are
852 used in the resulting Makefile.
854 New test-suite features
855 -----------------------
856 New modularization of test suite.
858 Thanks to a gracious relicensing of the test-suite infrastructure
859 from the git project, notmuch now has a modular test suite. This
860 provides the ability to run individual sections of the test suite
861 rather than the whole things. It also provides better summary of
862 test results, with support for tests that are expected to fail
863 (BROKEN and FIXED) in addition to PASS and FAIL. Finally, it makes
864 it easy to run the test suite within valgrind (pass --valgrind to
865 notmuch-test or to any sub-script) which has been very useful.
867 New testing of emacs interface.
869 The test suite has been augmented to allow automated testing of the
870 emacs interfaces. So far, this includes basic searches, display of
871 threads, and tag manipulation. This also includes a test that a new
872 message can successfully be sent out through a (dummy) SMTP server
873 and that said message is successfully integrated into the notmuch
874 database via the FCC setting.
878 Fix potential corruption of database when "notmuch new " is interrupted.
880 Previously, an interruption of "notmuch new" would (rarely) result
881 in a corrupt database. The corruption would manifest itself by a
882 persistent error of the form:
884 document ID of 1234 has no thread ID
886 The message-adding code has been carefully audited and reworked to
887 avoid this sort of corruption regardless of when it is interrupted.
889 Fix failure with extremely long message ID headers.
891 Previously, a message with an extremely long message ID, (say, more
892 than 300 characters), would fail to be added to notmuch, (triggering
893 Xapian exceptions). This has now been fixed.
895 Fix for messages with "charset=unknown-8bit"
897 Previously, messages with this charset would cause notmuch to emit a
898 GMime warning, (which would then trip up emacs or other interfaces
899 parsing the notmuch results).
901 Fix notmuch_query_search_threads function to return NULL on any exception
903 Fix "notmuch search" to return non-zero if notmuch_query_search_threads fails
905 Previously, this command could confusingly report a Xapian
906 exception, yet still return an error code of 0. It now correctly
907 returns a failing error code of 1 in this case.
911 Fix to handle a message with a subject containing, for example "[1234]"
913 Previously, a message subject containing a sequence of digits within
914 square brackets would cause the emacs interface to mis-parse the
915 output of "notmuch search". This would result in the message being
916 mis-displayed and prevent the user from manipulating the message in
919 Fix to correctly handle message IDs containing ".."
921 The emacs interface now properly quotes message IDs to avoid a
922 Xapian bug in which the ".." within a message ID would be
923 misinterpreted as a numeric range specification.
927 The python bindings for notmuch have been updated to work with python3.
929 Debian-specific fixes
930 ---------------------
931 Fix emacs initialization so "M-x notmuch" works for users by default.
933 Now, a new Debian user can immediately run "emacs -f notmuch" after
934 "apt-get install notmuch". Previously, the user would have had to
935 edit the ~/.emacs file to add "(require 'notmuch)" before this would
938 Notmuch 0.3.1 (2010-04-27)
939 ==========================
942 Fix an infinite loop in "notmuch reply"
944 This bug could be triggered by replying to a message where the
945 user's primary email address did not appear in the To: header and
946 the user had not configured any secondary email addresses. The bug
947 was a simple re-use of the same iterator variable in nested loops.
949 Fix a potential SEGV in "notmuch search"
951 This bug could be triggered by an author name ending in a ','.
952 Admittedly - that's almost certainly a spam email, but we never
953 want notmuch to crash.
957 Fix calculations for line wrapping in the primary "notmuch" view.
959 Fix Fcc support to prompt to create a directory if the specified Fcc
960 directory does not exist.
964 Fix build on OpenSolaris (at least) due to missing 'extern "C"' block.
966 Without this, the C++ sources could not find strcasestr and the
967 final linking of notmuch would fail.
969 Notmuch 0.3 (2010-04-27)
970 ========================
971 New command-line features
972 -------------------------
973 User-configurable tags for new messages
975 A new "new.tags" option is available in the configuration file to
976 determine which tags are applied to new messages. Run "notmuch
977 setup" to generate new documentation within ~/.notmuch-config on how
978 to specify this value.
980 Threads search results named based on subjects that match search
982 This means that when new mails arrived to a thread you've previously
983 read, and the new mails have a new subject, you will see that
984 subject in the search results rather than the old subject.
986 Faster operation of "notmuch tag" (avoid unneeded sorting)
988 Since the user just wants to tag all matching messages, we can make
989 things perform a bit faster by avoiding the sort.
991 Even Better guessing of From: header for "notmuch reply"
993 Notmuch now looks at a number of headers when trying to figure out
994 the best From: header to use in a reply. This is helpful if you have
995 several configured email addresses, and you also subscribe to various
996 mailing lists with different addresses, (so that mails you are
997 replying to won't always include your subscribed address in the To:
1000 Indication of author names that match a search
1002 When notmuch displays threads as the result of a search, it now
1003 lists the authors that match the search before listing the other
1004 authors in the thread. It inserts a pipe '|' symbol between the last
1005 matching and first non-matching author. This is especially useful in
1006 a search that includes tag:unread. Now the authors of the unread
1007 messages in the thread are listed first.
1009 New: Python bindings
1010 --------------------
1011 Sebastian Spaeth has contributed his python bindings for the notmuch
1012 library to the central repository. These bindings were previously
1013 known as "cnotmuch" within python but have now been renamed to be
1014 accessible with a simple, and more official-looking "import notmuch".
1016 The bindings have already proven very useful as people proficient in
1017 python have been able to easily develop programs to do notmuch-based
1018 searches for email-address completion, maildir-flag synchronization,
1021 These bindings are available within the bindings/python directory, but
1022 are not yet integrated into the top-level Makefiles, nor the top-level
1023 package-building scripts. Improvements are welcome.
1025 Emacs interface improvements
1026 ----------------------------
1027 An entirely new initial view for notmuch, (friendly yet powerful)
1029 Some of us call the new view "notmuch hello" but you can get at it
1030 by simply calling "emacs -f notmuch". The new view provides a search
1031 bar where new searches can be performed. It also displays a list of
1032 recent searches, along with a button to save any of these, giving it
1033 a new name as a "saved search". Many people find these "saved
1034 searches" one of the most convenient ways of organizing their mail,
1035 (providing all of the features of "folders" in other mail clients,
1036 but without any of the disadvantages).
1038 Finally, this view can also optionally display all of the tags that
1039 exist in the database, along with a count for each tag, and a custom
1040 search of messages with that tag that's simply a click (or keypress)
1043 Note: For users that liked the original mode of "emacs -f notmuch"
1044 immediately displaying a particular search result, we
1045 recommend instead running something like:
1047 emacs --eval '(notmuch search "tag:inbox" t)'
1049 The "t" means to sort the messages in an "oldest first" order,
1050 (as notmuch would do previously by default). You can also
1051 leave that off to have your search results in "newest first"
1054 Full-featured "customize" support for configuring notmuch
1056 Notmuch now plugs in well to the emacs "customize" mode to make it
1057 much simpler to find things about the notmuch interface that can be
1058 tweaked by the user.
1060 You can get to this mode by starting at the main "Customize" menu in
1061 emacs, then browsing through "Applications", "Mail", and
1062 "Notmuch". Or you can go straight to "M-x customize-group"
1065 Once you're at the customize screen, you'll see a list of documented
1066 options that can be manipulated along with checkboxes, drop-down
1067 selectors, and text-entry boxes for configuring the various
1070 Support for doing tab-completion of email addresses
1072 This support currently relies on an external program,
1073 (notmuch-addresses), that is not yet shipped with notmuch
1074 itself. But multiple, suitable implementations of this program have
1075 already been written that generate address completions by doing
1076 notmuch searches of your email collection. For example, providing
1077 first those addresses that you have composed messages to in the
1080 One such program (implemented in python with the python bindings to
1081 notmuch) is available via:
1083 git clone http://jkr.acm.jhu.edu/git/notmuch_addresses.git
1085 Install that program as notmuch-addresses on your PATH, and then
1086 hitting TAB on a partial email address or name within the To: or Cc:
1087 line of an email message will provide matching completions.
1089 Support for file-based (Fcc) delivery of sent messages to mail store
1091 This isn't yet enabled by default. To enable this, one will have to
1092 set the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" setting within the notmuch customize
1093 screen, (see its documentation there for details). We anticipate
1094 making this automatic in a future release.
1096 New 'G' key binding to trigger mail refresh (G == "Get new mail")
1098 The 'G' key works wherever '=' works. Before refreshing the screen
1099 it calls an external program that can be used to poll email servers,
1100 run notmuch new and setup specific tags for the new emails. The
1101 script to be called should be configured with the "Notmuch Poll
1102 Script" setting in the customize interface. This script will
1103 typically invoke "notmuch new" and then perhaps several "notmuch
1106 Implement emacs message display with the JSON output from notmuch.
1108 This is much more robust than the previous implementation, (where
1109 some HTML mails and mail quoting the notmuch code with the delimiter
1110 characters in it would cause the parser to fall over).
1112 Better handling of HTML messages and MIME attachments (inline images!)
1114 Allow for any MIME parts that emacs can display to be displayed
1115 inline. This includes inline viewing of image attachments, (provided
1116 the window is large enough to fit the image at its natural size).
1118 Much more robust handling of HTML messages. Currently both text/plain
1119 and text/html alternates will be rendered next to each other. In a
1120 future release, users will be able to decide to see only one or the
1121 other representation.
1123 Each attachment now has its own button so that attachments can be
1124 saved individually (the 'w' key is still available to save all
1127 Customizable support for tidying of text/plain message content
1129 Many new functions are available for tidying up message
1130 content. These include options such as wrapping long lines,
1131 compressing duplicate blank lines, etc.
1133 Most of these are disabled by default, but can easily be enabled by
1134 clicking the available check boxes under the "Notmuch Show Insert
1135 Text/Plain Hook" within the notmuch customize screen.
1137 New support for searchable citations (even when hidden)
1139 When portions of overly-long citations are hidden, the contents of
1140 these citations will still be available for emacs' standard
1141 "incremental search" functions. When the search matches any portion
1142 of a hidden citation, the citation will become visible temporarily
1143 to display the search result.
1145 More flexible handling of header visibility
1147 As an answer to complaints from many users, the To, Cc, and Date
1148 headers of messages are no longer hidden by default. For those users
1149 that liked that these were hidden, a new "Notmuch Messages Headers
1150 Visible" option in the customize interface can be set to nil. The
1151 visibility of headers can still be toggled on a per-message basis
1152 with the 'h' keybinding.
1154 For users that don't want to see some subset of those headers, the
1155 new "Notmuch Message Headers" variable can be customized to list
1156 only those headers that should be present in the display of a message.
1158 The Return key now toggles message visibility anywhere
1160 Previously this worked only on the first summary-line of a message.
1162 Customizable formatting of search results
1164 The user can easily customize the order, width, and formatting of
1165 the various fields in a "notmuch search" buffer. See the "Notmuch
1166 Search Result Format" section of the customize interface.
1168 Generate nicer names for search buffers when using a saved search.
1170 Add a notmuch User-Agent header when sending mail from notmuch/emacs.
1172 New keybinding (M-Ret) to open all collapsed messages in a thread.
1176 Provide a new NOTMUCH_SORT_UNSORTED value for queries
1178 This can be somewhat faster when sorting simply isn't desired. For
1179 example when collecting a set of messages that will all be
1180 manipulated identically, (adding a tag, removing a tag, deleting the
1181 messages), then there's no advantage to sorting the messages by
1186 Fix to compile against GMime 2.6
1188 Previously notmuch insisted on being able to find GMime 2.4, (even
1189 though GMime 2.6 would have worked all along).
1191 Fix configure script to accept (and ignore) various standard options.
1193 For example, those that the Gentoo build scripts expect configure to
1194 accept are now all accepted.
1198 A large number of new tests for the many new features.
1200 Better display of output from failed tests.
1202 Now shows failures with diff rather than forcing the user to gaze at
1203 complete actual and expected output looking for deviation.
1205 Notmuch 0.2 (2010-04-16)
1206 ========================
1207 This is the second release of the notmuch mail system, with actual
1208 detailed release notes this time!
1210 This release consists of a number of minor new features that make
1211 notmuch more pleasant to use, and a few fairly major bug fixes.
1213 We didn't quite hit our release target of "about a week" from the 0.1
1214 release, (0.2 is happening 11 days after 0.1), but we hope to do
1215 better for next week. Look forward to some major features coming to
1216 notmuch in subsequent releases.
1222 Better guessing of From: header.
1224 Notmuch now tries harder to guess which configured address should be
1225 used as the From: line in a "notmuch reply". It will examine the
1226 Received: headers if it fails to find any configured address in To:
1227 or Cc:. This allows it to often choose the correct address even when
1228 replying to a message sent to a mailing list, and not directly to a
1231 Make "notmuch count" with no arguments count all messages
1233 Previously, it was hard to construct a search term that was
1234 guaranteed to match all messages.
1236 Provide a new special-case search term of "*" to match all messages.
1238 This can be used in any command accepting a search term, such as
1239 "notmuch search '*'". Note that you'll want to take care that the
1240 shell doesn't expand * against the current files. And note that the
1241 support for "*" is a special case. It's only meaningful as a single
1242 search term and loses its special meaning when combined with any
1245 Automatically detect thread connections even when a parent message is
1248 Previously, if two or more message were received with a common
1249 parent, but that parent was not received, then these messages would
1250 not be recognized as belonging to the same thread. This is now fixed
1251 so that such messages are properly connected in a thread.
1255 Fix potential data loss in "notmuch new" with SIGINT
1257 One code path in "notmuch new" was not properly handling
1258 SIGINT. Previously, this could lead to messages being removed from
1259 the database (and their tags being lost) if the user pressed
1260 Control-C while "notmuch new" was working.
1262 Fix segfault when a message includes a MIME part that is empty.
1264 Fix handling of non-ASCII characters with --format=json
1266 Previously, characters outside the range of 7-bit ASCII were
1267 silently dropped from the JSON output. This led to corrupted display
1268 of utf-8 content in the upcoming notmuch web-based frontends.
1270 Fix headers to be properly decoded in "notmuch reply"
1272 Previously, the user might see:
1274 Subject: Re: =?iso-8859-2?q?Rozlu=E8ka?=
1278 Subject: Re: Rozlučka
1280 The former text is properly encoded to be RFC-compliant SMTP, will
1281 be sent correctly, and will be properly decoded by the
1282 recipient. But the user trying to edit the reply would likely be
1283 unable to read or edit that field in its encoded form.
1285 Emacs client features
1286 ---------------------
1287 Show the last few lines of citations as well as the first few lines.
1289 It's often the case that the last sentence of a citation is what is
1290 being replied to directly, so the last few lines are often much more
1291 important. The number of lines shown at the beginning and end of any
1292 citation can be configured, (notmuch-show-citation-lines-prefix and
1293 notmuch-show-citation-lines-suffix).
1295 The '+' and '-' commands in the search view can now add and remove
1298 Selective bulk tagging is now possible by selecting a region of
1299 threads and then using either the '+' or '-' keybindings. Bulk
1300 tagging is still available for all threads matching the current
1301 search with the '*' binding.
1303 More meaningful buffer names for thread-view buffers.
1305 Notmuch now uses the Subject of the thread as the buffer
1306 name. Previously it was using the thread ID, which is a meaningless
1309 Provide for customized colors of threads in search view based on tags.
1311 See the documentation of notmuch-search-line-faces, (or us "M-x
1312 customize" and browse to the "notmuch" group within "Applications"
1313 and "Mail"), for details on how to configure this colorization.
1315 Build-system features
1316 ---------------------
1317 Add support to properly build libnotmuch on Darwin systems (OS X).
1319 Add support to configure for many standard options.
1321 We include actual support for:
1323 --includedir --mandir --sysconfdir
1325 And accept and silently ignore several more:
1327 --build --infodir --libexecdir --localstatedir
1328 --disable-maintainer-mode --disable-dependency-tracking
1330 Install emacs client in "make install" rather than requiring a
1331 separate "make install-emacs".
1333 Automatically compute versions numbers between releases.
1335 This support uses the git-describe notation, so a version such as
1336 0.1-144-g43cbbfc indicates a version that is 144 commits since the
1337 0.1 release and is available as git commit "43cbbfc".
1339 Add a new "make test" target to run the test suite and actually verify
1342 Notmuch 0.1 (2010-04-05)
1343 ========================
1344 This is the first release of the notmuch mail system.
1346 It includes the libnotmuch library, the notmuch command-line
1347 interface, and an emacs-based interface to notmuch.
1349 Note: Notmuch will work best with Xapian 1.0.18 (or later) or Xapian
1350 1.1.4 (or later). Previous versions of Xapian (whether 1.0 or 1.1) had
1351 a performance bug that made notmuch very slow when modifying
1352 tags. This would cause distracting pauses when reading mail while
1353 notmuch would wait for Xapian when removing the "inbox" and "unread"
1354 tags from messages in a thread.