[[!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: 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 https://notmuch.readthedocs.io/) 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.