1 [[!meta date="2011-07-01"]]
3 Notmuch 0.6 (2011-07-01)
4 =======================
9 Notmuch queries can now include a search term to match the
10 directories in which mail files are stored (within the mail
11 storage). The syntax is as follows:
15 For example, one might use things such as:
21 to match any path containing a directory "spam", "work/todo", or
22 containing a directory starting with "2011-", respectively.
24 This feature is particularly useful for users of delivery-agent
25 software (such as procmail or maildrop) that is filtering mail and
26 delivering it to particular folders, or users of systems such as
27 Gmail that use filesystem directories to indicate message tags.
29 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
30 notmuch will be searchable with folder: terms. In order to enable
31 this feature for all mail, the entire notmuch index will need to be
34 notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
35 # Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
37 notmuch restore notmuch.dump
41 Both the command line interface and the emacs-interface have new
42 support for PGP/MIME, detailed below. Thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor
43 and Jameson Graef Rollins for making this happen.
45 New, automatic tags: "signed" and "encrypted"
47 These tags will automatically be applied to messages containing
48 multipart/signed and multipart/encrypted parts.
50 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
51 notmuch will receive these tags.
53 New command-line features
54 -------------------------
55 Add new "notmuch show --verify" option for signature verification
57 This option instruct notmuch to verify the signature of
58 PGP/MIME-signed parts.
60 Add new "notmuch show --decrypt" and "notmuch reply --decrypt" options
62 This option instructs notmuch to decrypt PGP/MIME-encrypted parts.
63 Note that this feature currently requires gpg-agent and a passphrase entry
64 tool (e.g. pinentry-gtk or pinentry-curses).
66 Proper nesting of multipart parts in "notmuch show" output
68 MIME parts are now display with proper nesting to reflect original
69 MIME hierarchy of a message. This allows clients to correctly
70 analyze the MIME structure, (such as, for example, determining to
71 which parts a signature part applies).
73 Add new "notmuch show --part" option
75 This is a replacement for the older "notmuch part" command, (which
76 is now deprecated—it should still work as always, but is no longer
77 documented). Putting part output under "notmuch show" allows for all
78 of the "notmuch show" options to be applied when extracting a single
79 part, (such as --format=json for extracting a message part with JSON
82 Deprecate "notmuch search-tags", (in favor of "notmuch search --output=tags *")
84 The "notmuch search-tags" sub-command has been redundant since the
85 addition of the --output=tags option to "notmuch search". We now
86 make that more clear by deprecating "notmuch search-tags", (dropping
87 it from the documentation). We do continue to support the old syntax
88 by translating it internally to the new call.
90 Performance improvements
91 ------------------------
92 Faster searches (by doing fewer searches to construct threads)
94 Whenever a user asks for search results as threads, notmuch first
95 performs a search for messages matching the query, then performs
96 additional searches to find other messages in the resulting threads.
98 Removing inefficiencies and redundancies in these secondary searches
99 results in a measured speedups of 1.5x for a typical search.
101 Faster searches (by doing fewer passes to gather message data)
103 Optimizing Xapian data access patterns (using a single pass to get
104 all message-document data rather than a pass for each data type)
105 results in a measured speedup of 1.7x for a typical search.
107 The benefits of this optimization combine with the preceding
108 optimization. With both in place, Austin Clements measured a speedup
109 of 2.5x for a search of all messages in his inbox (was 4.5s, now
110 1.8s). Thanks, Austin!
112 Faster initial indexing
114 More efficient indexing of new messages results in a measured
115 speedup of 1.4x for the initial indexing of 3 GB of mail (1h 14m
116 rather than 1h 46m). Thanks to Austin Clements and Michal Sojka.
118 Make "notmuch new" faster for unchanged directories
120 Optimizing to not do any further examinations of sub-directories
121 when the filesystem indicates that a directory is unchanged from the
122 last "notmuch new" results in measured speedups of 8.5 for the "No
123 new mail" case, (was 0.77s, now 0.09s). Thanks to Karel Zak.
125 New emacs-interface features
126 ----------------------------
128 Support for PGP/MIME (GnuPG)
130 Automatically indicate validity of signatures for multipart/signed
131 messages. Automatically display decrypted content for
132 multipart/encrypted messages. See the emacs variable
133 notmuch-crypto-process-mime for more information. Note that this
134 needs gpg-agent and a pinentry tool just as the command line tools.
135 Also note there is no support SMIME yet.
137 Output of pipe command is now displayed if pipe command fails
139 This is extremely useful in the common use case of piping a patch to
140 "git am". If git fails to cleanly merge the patch the error messages
141 from the failed merge are now clearly displayed to the user, (where
142 previously they were silently hidden from the user).
144 User-selectable From address
146 A user can choose which configured email addresses should be used as
147 the From address whenever composing a new message. To do so, simply
148 press C-u before the command which will open a new message. Emacs
149 will prompt for the from address to use.
151 The user can customize the "Notmuch Identities" setting in the
152 notmuch customize group in order to use addresses other than those in
153 the notmuch configuration file if desired.
155 The user can also choose to always be prompted for the from address
156 when composing a new message (without having to use C-u) by setting
157 the "Notmuch Always Prompt For Sender" option in the notmuch
160 Hiding of repeated subjects in collapsed thread view
162 In notmuch-show mode, if a collapsed message has the same subject as
163 its parent, the subject is not shown.
165 Automatic detection and hiding of original message in top-posted message
167 When a message contains a line looking something like:
169 ----- Original Message -----
171 emacs hides this and all subsequent lines as an "original message",
172 (allowing the user to click or press enter on the "original message"
173 button to display it again). This makes the handling of top-posted
174 citations work much like conventional citations.
176 New hooks for running code when tags are modified
178 Some users want to perform additional actions whenever a particular
179 tag is added/removed from a message. This could be used to, for
180 example, interface with some external spam-recognition training
181 tool. To facilitate this, two new hooks are added which can be
182 modified in the following settings of the notmuch customize group:
184 Notmuch Before Tag Hook
185 Notmuch After Tag Hook
187 New optional support for hiding some multipart/alternative parts
189 Many emails are sent with redundant content within a
190 multipart/alternative group (such as a text/plain part as well as a
191 text/html part). Users can configure the setting:
193 Notmuch Show All Multipart/Alternative Parts
195 to "off" in the notmuch customize group to have the interface
196 automatically hide some part alternatives (such as text/html
197 parts). This new part hiding is not configured by default yet
198 because there's not yet a simple way to re-display such a hidden
199 part if it is not actually redundant with a displayed part.
201 Better rendering of text/x-vcalendar parts
203 These parts are now displayed in a format suitable for use with the
206 Avoid getting confused by Subject and Author fields with newline characters
208 Replacing all characters with ASCII code less than 32 with a question mark.
210 Cleaner display of From line in email messages (remove double quotes,
211 and drop "name" if it's actually just a repeat of the email address).
213 Vim interface improvements
214 --------------------------
215 Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface:
217 * Using sendmail directly rather than mailx,
218 * Implementing archive in show view
219 * Add support to mark as read in show and search views
220 * Add delete commands
223 Bindings improvements
224 ---------------------
225 Ruby bindings are now much more complete
227 Including QUERY.sort, QUERY.to_s, MESSAGE.maildir_flags_to_tags,
228 MESSAGE.tags_to_maildir_flags, and MESSAGE.get_filenames
230 * Python bindings have been upodated and extended
231 (docs online at http://packages.python.org/notmuch/)
234 - Message().get_filenames(),
235 - Message().tags_to_maildir_flags(),Message().maildir_flags_to_tags()
236 - list(Threads()) and list(Messages) works now
238 - Message().__cmp__() and __hash__()
239 These allow, for example:
242 As well as set arithmetic on Messages():
244 s1, s2= set(msgs1), set(msgs2)
249 - len(Messages()) as it exausted the iterator.
250 Use len(list(Messages())) or
251 Query.count_messages() to get the length.
253 Added initial Go bindings in bindings/go
255 New build-system features
256 -------------------------
257 Added support for building in a directory other than the source directory
259 This can be used with the widely-supported idiom of simply running
260 the configure script from some other directory:
267 Fix to save configure options for future, implicit runs of configure
269 When a user updates the source (such as with "git pull") calling
270 "make" may cause an automatic re-run of the configure script. When
271 this happens, the configure script will automatically be called with
272 the same options the user originally passed in the most-recent
273 manual invocation of configure.
275 New test-suite feature
276 ----------------------
277 Binary for bash for running test suite now located via PATH.
279 The notmuch test suite requires a fairly recent version of bash (>=
280 bash 4). As some systems supply an older version of bash at
281 /bin/bash, the test suite is now updated to search $PATH to locate
282 the bash binary. This allows users of systems with old /bin/bash to
283 simply install bash >= 4 somewhere on $PATH before /bin and then use
286 Support for testing output with a trailing newline.
288 Previously, some tests would fail to notice a difference in the
289 presence/absence of a trailing newline in a program output, (which
290 has led to bugs in the past). Now, carefully-written tests (using
291 test_expect_equal_file rather than test_expect_equal) will detect
292 any change in the presence/absence of a trailing newline. Many tests
293 are updated to take advantage of this.
295 Avoiding accessing user's $HOME while running test suite
297 The test suite now carefully creates its own HOME directory. This
298 allows the test suite to be run with no existing HOME directory, (as
299 some build systems apparently do), and avoids test-suite differences
300 due to configuration files in the users HOME directory.
305 Output *all* files for "notmuch search --output=files"
307 For the cases where multiple files have the same Message ID,
308 previous versions of notmuch would output only one such file. This
309 command is now fixed to correctly output all files.
311 Fixed spurious search results from "overlapped" indexing of addresses
313 This fixed a bug where a search for:
315 to:user@elsewhere.com
317 would incorrectly match a message sent:
319 To: user@example,com, someone@elsewhere.com
321 Fix --output=json when search has no results
323 A bug present since notmuch 0.4 had caused searches with no results
324 to produce an invalid json object. This is now fixed to cleanly
325 return a valid json object representing an empty array "[]" as
328 fix the automatic detection of the From address for "notmuch reply"
329 from the Received headers in some cases.
331 Fix core dump on DragonFlyBSD due to -1 return value from
332 sysconf(_SC_GETPW_R_SIZE_MAX).
334 Cleaned up several memory leaks
336 Eliminated a few, rare segmentation faults and a double-free.
338 Fix libnotmuch library to only export notmuch API functions
340 Previous release of the notmuch library also exported some Xapian
341 C++ exception type symbols. These were never part of the library
342 interface and were never intended to be exported.
344 Emacs-interface bug fixes
345 -------------------------
346 Display any unexpected output or errors from "notmuch search" invocations
348 Previously any misformatted output or trailing error messages were
349 silently ignored. This output is now clearly displayed. This fix was
350 very helpful in identifying and fixing the bug described below.
352 Fix bug where some threads would be missing from large search results
354 When a search returned a "large" number of results, the emacs
355 interface was incorrectly dropping one thread every time the output
356 of the "notmuch search" process spanned the emacs read-buffer. This
359 Avoid re-compression of .gz files (and similar) when saving attachment
361 Emacs was being too clever for its own good and trying to
362 re-compress pre-compressed .gz files when saving such attachments
363 (potentially corrupting the attachment). The emacs interface is
364 fixed to avoid this bug.
366 Fix hiding of a message when a previously-hidden citation is visible
368 Previously the citation would remain visible in this case. This is
369 fixed so that hiding a message hides all parts.