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[notmuch-wiki] / news / release-0.6.mdwn

[[!meta date="2011-07-01"]]

Notmuch 0.6 (2011-07-01)
=======================

New, general features
---------------------

### Folder-based searching

  Notmuch queries can now include a search term to match the
  directories in which mail files are stored (within the mail
  storage). The syntax is as follows:

        folder:<path>

  For example, one might use things such as:

        folder:spam
        folder:2011-*
        folder:work/todo

  to match any path containing a directory "spam", "work/todo", or
  containing a directory starting with "2011-", respectively.

  This feature is particularly useful for users of delivery-agent
  software (such as procmail or maildrop) that is filtering mail and
  delivering it to particular folders, or users of systems such as
  Gmail that use filesystem directories to indicate message tags.

  NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
  notmuch will be searchable with folder: terms. In order to enable
  this feature for all mail, the entire notmuch index will need to be
  rebuilt as follows:

        notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
        # Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
        notmuch new
        notmuch restore notmuch.dump

### Support for PGP/MIME

  Both the command-line interface and the emacs-interface have new
  support for PGP/MIME, detailed below. Thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor
  and Jameson Graef Rollins for making this happen.

### New, automatic tags: "signed" and "encrypted"

  These tags will automatically be applied to messages containing
  multipart/signed and multipart/encrypted parts.

  NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
  notmuch will receive these tags.

New command-line features
-------------------------

### Add new "notmuch show --verify" option for signature verification

  This option instruct notmuch to verify the signature of
  PGP/MIME-signed parts.

### Add new "notmuch show --decrypt" and "notmuch reply --decrypt" options

  This option instructs notmuch to decrypt PGP/MIME-encrypted parts.
  Note that this feature currently requires gpg-agent and a passphrase entry
  tool (e.g. pinentry-gtk or pinentry-curses).

### Proper nesting of multipart parts in "notmuch show" output

  MIME parts are now display with proper nesting to reflect original
  MIME hierarchy of a message. This allows clients to correctly
  analyze the MIME structure, (such as, for example, determining to
  which parts a signature part applies).

### Add new "notmuch show --part" option

  This is a replacement for the older "notmuch part" command, (which
  is now deprecated—it should still work as always, but is no longer
  documented). Putting part output under "notmuch show" allows for all
  of the "notmuch show" options to be applied when extracting a single
  part, (such as --format=json for extracting a message part with JSON
  formatting).

### Deprecate "notmuch search-tags" (in favor of "notmuch search --output=tags *")

  The "notmuch search-tags" sub-command has been redundant since the
  addition of the --output=tags option to "notmuch search". We now
  make that more clear by deprecating "notmuch search-tags", (dropping
  it from the documentation). We do continue to support the old syntax
  by translating it internally to the new call.

Performance improvements
------------------------

### Faster searches (by doing fewer searches to construct threads)

  Whenever a user asks for search results as threads, notmuch first
  performs a search for messages matching the query, then performs
  additional searches to find other messages in the resulting threads.

  Removing inefficiencies and redundancies in these secondary searches
  results in a measured speedups of 1.5x for a typical search.

### Faster searches (by doing fewer passes to gather message data)

  Optimizing Xapian data access patterns (using a single pass to get
  all message-document data rather than a pass for each data type)
  results in a measured speedup of 1.7x for a typical search.

  The benefits of this optimization combine with the preceding
  optimization. With both in place, Austin Clements measured a speedup
  of 2.5x for a search of all messages in his inbox (was 4.5s, now
  1.8s). Thanks, Austin!

### Faster initial indexing

  More efficient indexing of new messages results in a measured
  speedup of 1.4x for the initial indexing of 3 GB of mail (1h 14m
  rather than 1h 46m). Thanks to Austin Clements and Michal Sojka.

### Make "notmuch new" faster for unchanged directories

  Optimizing to not do any further examinations of sub-directories
  when the filesystem indicates that a directory is unchanged from the
  last "notmuch new" results in measured speedups of 8.5 for the "No
  new mail" case, (was 0.77s, now 0.09s). Thanks to Karel Zak.

New emacs-interface features
----------------------------

### Support for PGP/MIME (GnuPG)

  Automatically indicate validity of signatures for multipart/signed
  messages.  Automatically display decrypted content for
  multipart/encrypted messages.  See the emacs variable
  notmuch-crypto-process-mime for more information. Note that this
  needs gpg-agent and a pinentry tool just as the command-line tools.
  Also note there is no support SMIME yet.

### Output of pipe command is now displayed if pipe command fails

  This is extremely useful in the common use case of piping a patch to
  "git am". If git fails to cleanly merge the patch the error messages
  from the failed merge are now clearly displayed to the user, (where
  previously they were silently hidden from the user).

### User-selectable From address

  A user can choose which configured email addresses should be used as
  the From address whenever composing a new message. To do so, simply
  press C-u before the command which will open a new message. Emacs
  will prompt for the from address to use.

  The user can customize the "Notmuch Identities" setting in the
  notmuch customize group in order to use addresses other than those in
  the notmuch configuration file if desired.

  The user can also choose to always be prompted for the from address
  when composing a new message (without having to use C-u) by setting
  the "Notmuch Always Prompt For Sender" option in the notmuch
  customize group.

### Hiding of repeated subjects in collapsed thread view

  In notmuch-show mode, if a collapsed message has the same subject as
  its parent, the subject is not shown.

### Automatic detection and hiding of original message in top-posted message

  When a message contains a line looking something like:

        ----- Original Message -----

  emacs hides this and all subsequent lines as an "original message",
  (allowing the user to click or press enter on the "original message"
  button to display it again). This makes the handling of top-posted
  citations work much like conventional citations.

### New hooks for running code when tags are modified

  Some users want to perform additional actions whenever a particular
  tag is added/removed from a message. This could be used to, for
  example, interface with some external spam-recognition training
  tool. To facilitate this, two new hooks are added which can be
  modified in the following settings of the notmuch customize group:

        Notmuch Before Tag Hook
        Notmuch After Tag Hook

### New optional support for hiding some multipart/alternative parts

  Many emails are sent with redundant content within a
  multipart/alternative group (such as a text/plain part as well as a
  text/html part). Users can configure the setting:

        Notmuch Show All Multipart/Alternative Parts

  to "off" in the notmuch customize group to have the interface
  automatically hide some part alternatives (such as text/html
  parts). This new part hiding is not configured by default yet
  because there's not yet a simple way to re-display such a hidden
  part if it is not actually redundant with a displayed part.

### Better rendering of text/x-vcalendar parts

  These parts are now displayed in a format suitable for use with the
  emacs diary.

### Avoid getting confused by Subject and Author fields with newline characters

  Replacing all characters with ASCII code less than 32 with a question mark.

### Cleaner display of From line in email messages

  Remove double quotes, and drop "name" if it's actually just a repeat of
  the email address.

Vim interface improvements
--------------------------

### Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface:

  * Using sendmail directly rather than mailx,
  * Implementing archive in show view
  * Add support to mark as read in show and search views
  * Add delete commands
  * Various cleanups.

Bindings improvements
---------------------

### Ruby bindings are now much more complete

  Including `QUERY.sort`, `QUERY.to_s`, `MESSAGE.maildir_flags_to_tags`,
  `MESSAGE.tags_to_maildir_flags`, and `MESSAGE.get_filenames`

### Python bindings have been updated and extended

  (docs online at http://packages.python.org/notmuch/)

  New bindings:

  - `Message().get_filenames()`,
  - `Message().tags_to_maildir_flags()`, `Message().maildir_flags_to_tags()`,
  - `list(Threads())` and `list(Messages)` works now

  - `Message().__cmp__()` and `__hash__()`

  These allow, for example:

            if msg1 == msg2: ...

  As well as set arithmetic on `Messages()`:

            s1, s2 = set(msgs1), set(msgs2)
            s1.union(s2)
            s2 -= s1

  Removed:

  - `len(Messages())` as it exhausted the iterator

  Use `len(list(Messages()))` or `Query.count_messages()` 
  to get the length.

### Added initial Go bindings in bindings/go

New build-system features
-------------------------

### Added support for building in a directory other than the source directory

  This can be used with the widely-supported idiom of simply running
  the configure script from some other directory:

        mkdir build
        cd build
        ../configure
        make

### Fix to save configure options for future, implicit runs of configure

  When a user updates the source (such as with "git pull") calling
  "make" may cause an automatic re-run of the configure script. When
  this happens, the configure script will automatically be called with
  the same options the user originally passed in the most-recent
  manual invocation of configure.

New test-suite feature
----------------------

### Binary for bash for running test suite now located via PATH

  The notmuch test suite requires a fairly recent version of bash (>=
  bash 4). As some systems supply an older version of bash at
  /bin/bash, the test suite is now updated to search $PATH to locate
  the bash binary. This allows users of systems with old /bin/bash to
  simply install bash >= 4 somewhere on $PATH before /bin and then use
  the test suite.

### Support for testing output with a trailing newline

  Previously, some tests would fail to notice a difference in the
  presence/absence of a trailing newline in a program output, (which
  has led to bugs in the past). Now, carefully-written tests (using
  `test_expect_equal_file` rather than `test_expect_equal`) will detect
  any change in the presence/absence of a trailing newline. Many tests
  are updated to take advantage of this.

### Avoiding accessing user's $HOME while running test suite

  The test suite now carefully creates its own HOME directory. This
  allows the test suite to be run with no existing HOME directory, (as
  some build systems apparently do), and avoids test-suite differences
  due to configuration files in the users HOME directory.


General bug fixes
-----------------

### Output *all* files for "notmuch search --output=files"

  For the cases where multiple files have the same Message ID,
  previous versions of notmuch would output only one such file. This
  command is now fixed to correctly output all files.

### Fixed spurious search results from "overlapped" indexing of addresses

  This fixed a bug where a search for:

        to:user@elsewhere.com

  would incorrectly match a message sent:

        To: user@example,com, someone@elsewhere.com

### Fix --output=json when search has no results

  A bug present since notmuch 0.4 had caused searches with no results
  to produce an invalid json object. This is now fixed to cleanly
  return a valid json object representing an empty array "[]" as
  expected.

### Fix the automatic detection of the From address for "notmuch reply" from the Received headers in some cases

### Fix core dump on DragonFlyBSD due to -1 return value from `sysconf(_SC_GETPW_R_SIZE_MAX)`

### Cleaned up several memory leaks

### Eliminated a few, rare segmentation faults and a double-free

### Fix libnotmuch library to only export notmuch API functions

  Previous release of the notmuch library also exported some Xapian
  C++ exception type symbols. These were never part of the library
  interface and were never intended to be exported.

Emacs-interface bug fixes
-------------------------

### Display any unexpected output or errors from "notmuch search" invocations

  Previously any misformatted output or trailing error messages were
  silently ignored. This output is now clearly displayed. This fix was
  very helpful in identifying and fixing the bug described below.

### Fix bug where some threads would be missing from large search results

  When a search returned a "large" number of results, the emacs
  interface was incorrectly dropping one thread every time the output
  of the "notmuch search" process spanned the emacs read-buffer. This
  is now fixed.

### Avoid re-compression of .gz files (and similar) when saving attachment

  Emacs was being too clever for its own good and trying to
  re-compress pre-compressed .gz files when saving such attachments
  (potentially corrupting the attachment). The emacs interface is
  fixed to avoid this bug.

### Fix hiding of a message when a previously-hidden citation is visible

  Previously the citation would remain visible in this case. This is
  fixed so that hiding a message hides all parts.