1 Notmuch 0.11 (201x-xx-xx)
2 =========================
4 New command-line features
5 -------------------------
9 Hooks have been introduced to notmuch. Hooks are scripts that notmuch
10 invokes before and after certain actions. Initially, "notmuch new"
11 supports "pre-new" and "post-new" hooks that are run before and after
12 importing new messages into the database.
17 Support "notmuch new" as a notmuch-poll-script
19 It's now possible to use "notmuch new" as a notmuch-poll-script
20 directly. This is also the new default. This allows taking better
21 advantage of the "notmuch new" hooks from emacs without intermediate
24 Improvements in saved search management
26 New saved searches are now appended to the list of saved searches,
27 not inserted in front. It's also possible to define a sort function
28 for displaying saved searches; alphabetical sort is provided.
33 Automatic tag query optimization
35 "notmuch tag" now automatically optimizes the user's query to
36 exclude messages whose tags won't change. In the past, we've
37 suggested that people do this by hand; this is no longer necessary.
42 Reduction of memory leaks
44 Two memory leaks when searching and showing messages were identified
45 and fixed in this release.
48 Notmuch 0.10.2 (2011-12-04)
49 ===========================
54 Fix crash in python bindings.
56 The python bindings did not call g_type_init, which caused crashes
57 for some, but not all users.
59 Notmuch 0.10.1 (2011-11-25)
60 ===========================
67 Argument processing changes in 0.10 introduced a bug where "notmuch
68 --help" crashed while "notmuch help" worked fine. This is fixed in
71 Notmuch 0.10 (2011-11-23)
72 =========================
74 New build and testing features
75 ------------------------------
77 Emacs tests are now done in dtach. This means that dtach is now
78 needed to run the notmuch test suite, at least until the checking for
79 prerequisites is improved.
81 Full test coverage of the stashing feature in Emacs.
83 New command-line features
84 -------------------------
86 Add "notmuch restore --accumulate" option
88 The --accumulate switch causes the union of the existing and new tags to be
89 applied, instead of replacing each message's tags as they are read in from
92 Add search terms to "notmuch dump"
94 The dump command now takes an optional search term much like notmuch
95 search/show/tag. The output file argument of dump is deprecated in
96 favour of using stdout.
98 Add "notmuch search" --offset and --limit options
100 The search command now takes options --offset=[-]N and --limit=N to limit
101 the number of results shown.
103 Add "notmuch count --output" option
105 The count command is now capable of counting threads in addition to
106 messages. This is selected using the new --output=(threads|messages) option.
108 New emacs UI features
109 ---------------------
111 Add tab-completion for notmuch-search and notmuch-search-filter
113 These functions now support completion tags for query parts
114 starting with "tag:".
116 Turn "id:MSG-ID" links into buttons associated with notmuch searches
118 Text of the form "id:MSG-ID" in mails is now a clickable button that
119 opens a notmuch search for the given message id.
121 Add keybinding ('c I') for stashing Message-ID's without an id: prefix
123 Reduces manual labour when stashing them for use outside notmuch.
125 Do not query on notmuch-search exit
127 It is harmless to kill the external notmuch process, so the user
128 is no longer interrogated when they interrupt a search.
133 Emacs now constructs large search buffers more efficiently
135 Search avoids opening and parsing message files
137 We now store more information in the database so search no longer
138 has to open every message file to get basic headers. This can
139 improve search speed by as much as 10X, but taking advantage of this
140 requires a database rebuild:
142 notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
143 # Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
145 notmuch restore notmuch.dump
147 New collection of add-on tools
148 ------------------------------
150 The source directory "contrib" contains tools built on notmuch. These
151 tools are not part of notmuch, and you should check their individual
152 licenses. Feel free to report problems with them to the notmuch
155 nmbug - share tags with a given prefix
157 nmbug helps maintain a git repo containing all tags with a given
158 prefix (by default "notmuch::"). Tags can be shared by commiting
159 them to git in one location and restoring in another.
161 Notmuch 0.9 (2011-10-01)
162 ========================
164 New, general features
165 ---------------------
167 Correct handling of interruptions during "notmuch new"
169 "notmuch new" now operates as a series of small, self-consistent
170 transactions, so it can correctly resume after an interruption or
171 crash. Previously, interruption could lose existing tags, fail to
172 detect messages on resume, or leave the database in a state
173 temporarily or permanently inconsistent with the mail store.
180 notmuch_database_begin_atomic and notmuch_database_end_atomic allow
181 multiple database operations to be performed atomically.
183 notmuch_database_find_message_by_filename does exactly what it says.
187 notmuch_database_find_message (and n_d_f_m_by_filename) now return
188 a status indicator and uses an output parameter for the
189 message. This change required changing the SONAME of libnotmuch to
192 Python bindings changes
193 -----------------------
195 - Re-encode python unicode objects to utf-8 before passing back to
197 - Support Database().begin_atomic()/end_atomic()
198 - Support Database().find_message_by_filename()
199 NB! This needs a db opened in READ-WRITE mode currently, or it will crash
200 the python process. The is a limitation (=bug) of the underlying libnotmuch.
201 - Fixes where we would not throw NotmuchErrors when we should (Justus Winter)
202 - Update for n_d_find_message* API changes (see above).
204 Ruby bindings changes
205 ---------------------
207 - Wrap new library functions notmuch_database_{begin,end}_atomic.
208 - Add new exception Notmuch::UnbalancedAtomicError.
209 - Rename destroy to destroy! according to Ruby naming conventions.
210 - Update for n_d_find_message* API changes (see above).
215 * Add gpg callback to crypto sigstatus buttons to retrieve/refresh
217 * Add notmuch-show-refresh-view function (and corresponding binding)
218 to refresh the view of a notmuch-show buffer.
220 Reply formatting cleanup
221 ------------------------
223 "notmuch reply" no longer includes notification that non-leafnode
224 MIME parts are being suppressed.
226 Notmuch 0.8 (2011-09-10)
227 ========================
229 Improved handling of message/rfc822 parts
231 Both in the CLI and the emacs interface. Output of rfc822 parts now
232 includes the primary headers, as well as the body and all subparts.
233 Output of the completely raw rfc822-formatted message, including all
234 headers, is unfortunately not yet supported (but hopefully will be
237 Improved Build system portability
239 Certain parts of the shell script generating notmuch.sym were
240 specific to the GNU versions of sed and nm. The new version should
241 be more portable to e.g. OpenBSD.
243 Documentation update for Ruby bindings
245 Added documentation, typo fixes, and improved support for rdoc.
247 Unicode, iterator, PEP8 changes for python bindings
249 - PEP8 (code formatting) changes for python files.
250 - Remove Tags.__len__ ; see 0.6 release notes for motivation.
251 - Decode headers as UTF8, encode (unicode) database paths as UTF8.
253 Notmuch 0.7 (2011-08-01)
254 ========================
256 Vim interface improvements
257 --------------------------
259 Jason Woofenden provided a number of bug fixes for the Vim interface
261 * fix citation/signature fold lengths
262 * fix cig/cit parsing within multipart/*
263 * fix on-screen instructions for show-signature
264 * fix from list reformatting in search view
265 * fix space key: now archives (did opposite)
267 Uwe Kleine-König contributed
269 * use full path for sendmail/doc fix
270 * fix compose temp file name
272 Python Bindings changes
273 -----------------------
275 Sebastian Spaeth contributed two changes related to unicode and UTF8:
277 * message tags are now explicitly unicode
278 * query string is encoded as a UTF8 byte string
280 Build-System improvements
281 ------------------------
283 Generate notmuch.sym after the relevant object files
285 This fixes a bug in parallel building. Thanks to Thomas Jost for the
288 Notmuch 0.6.1 (2011-07-17)
289 ==========================
294 Re-export Xapian exception typeinfo symbols.
296 It turned out our aggressive symbol hiding caused problems for
297 people running gcc 4.4.5.
299 Notmuch 0.6 (2011-07-01)
300 =======================
301 New, general features
302 ---------------------
303 Folder-based searching
305 Notmuch queries can now include a search term to match the
306 directories in which mail files are stored (within the mail
307 storage). The syntax is as follows:
311 For example, one might use things such as:
317 to match any path containing a directory "spam", "work/todo", or
318 containing a directory starting with "2011-", respectively.
320 This feature is particularly useful for users of delivery-agent
321 software (such as procmail or maildrop) that is filtering mail and
322 delivering it to particular folders, or users of systems such as
323 Gmail that use filesystem directories to indicate message tags.
325 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
326 notmuch will be searchable with folder: terms. In order to enable
327 this feature for all mail, the entire notmuch index will need to be
330 notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
331 # Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
333 notmuch restore notmuch.dump
337 Both the command line interface and the emacs-interface have new
338 support for PGP/MIME, detailed below. Thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor
339 and Jameson Graef Rollins for making this happen.
341 New, automatic tags: "signed" and "encrypted"
343 These tags will automatically be applied to messages containing
344 multipart/signed and multipart/encrypted parts.
346 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
347 notmuch will receive these tags.
349 New command-line features
350 -------------------------
351 Add new "notmuch show --verify" option for signature verification
353 This option instruct notmuch to verify the signature of
354 PGP/MIME-signed parts.
356 Add new "notmuch show --decrypt" and "notmuch reply --decrypt" options
358 This option instructs notmuch to decrypt PGP/MIME-encrypted parts.
359 Note that this feature currently requires gpg-agent and a passphrase entry
360 tool (e.g. pinentry-gtk or pinentry-curses).
362 Proper nesting of multipart parts in "notmuch show" output
364 MIME parts are now display with proper nesting to reflect original
365 MIME hierarchy of a message. This allows clients to correctly
366 analyze the MIME structure, (such as, for example, determining to
367 which parts a signature part applies).
369 Add new "notmuch show --part" option
371 This is a replacement for the older "notmuch part" command, (which
372 is now deprecated—it should still work as always, but is no longer
373 documented). Putting part output under "notmuch show" allows for all
374 of the "notmuch show" options to be applied when extracting a single
375 part, (such as --format=json for extracting a message part with JSON
378 Deprecate "notmuch search-tags", (in favor of "notmuch search --output=tags *")
380 The "notmuch search-tags" sub-command has been redundant since the
381 addition of the --output=tags option to "notmuch search". We now
382 make that more clear by deprecating "notmuch search-tags", (dropping
383 it from the documentation). We do continue to support the old syntax
384 by translating it internally to the new call.
386 Performance improvements
387 ------------------------
388 Faster searches (by doing fewer searches to construct threads)
390 Whenever a user asks for search results as threads, notmuch first
391 performs a search for messages matching the query, then performs
392 additional searches to find other messages in the resulting threads.
394 Removing inefficiencies and redundancies in these secondary searches
395 results in a measured speedups of 1.5x for a typical search.
397 Faster searches (by doing fewer passes to gather message data)
399 Optimizing Xapian data access patterns (using a single pass to get
400 all message-document data rather than a pass for each data type)
401 results in a measured speedup of 1.7x for a typical search.
403 The benefits of this optimization combine with the preceding
404 optimization. With both in place, Austin Clements measured a speedup
405 of 2.5x for a search of all messages in his inbox (was 4.5s, now
406 1.8s). Thanks, Austin!
408 Faster initial indexing
410 More efficient indexing of new messages results in a measured
411 speedup of 1.4x for the initial indexing of 3 GB of mail (1h 14m
412 rather than 1h 46m). Thanks to Austin Clements and Michal Sojka.
414 Make "notmuch new" faster for unchanged directories
416 Optimizing to not do any further examinations of sub-directories
417 when the filesystem indicates that a directory is unchanged from the
418 last "notmuch new" results in measured speedups of 8.5 for the "No
419 new mail" case, (was 0.77s, now 0.09s). Thanks to Karel Zak.
421 New emacs-interface features
422 ----------------------------
424 Support for PGP/MIME (GnuPG)
426 Automatically indicate validity of signatures for multipart/signed
427 messages. Automatically display decrypted content for
428 multipart/encrypted messages. See the emacs variable
429 notmuch-crypto-process-mime for more information. Note that this
430 needs gpg-agent and a pinentry tool just as the command line tools.
431 Also note there is no support SMIME yet.
433 Output of pipe command is now displayed if pipe command fails
435 This is extremely useful in the common use case of piping a patch to
436 "git am". If git fails to cleanly merge the patch the error messages
437 from the failed merge are now clearly displayed to the user, (where
438 previously they were silently hidden from the user).
440 User-selectable From address
442 A user can choose which configured email addresses should be used as
443 the From address whenever composing a new message. To do so, simply
444 press C-u before the command which will open a new message. Emacs
445 will prompt for the from address to use.
447 The user can customize the "Notmuch Identities" setting in the
448 notmuch customize group in order to use addresses other than those in
449 the notmuch configuration file if desired.
451 The user can also choose to always be prompted for the from address
452 when composing a new message (without having to use C-u) by setting
453 the "Notmuch Always Prompt For Sender" option in the notmuch
456 Hiding of repeated subjects in collapsed thread view
458 In notmuch-show mode, if a collapsed message has the same subject as
459 its parent, the subject is not shown.
461 Automatic detection and hiding of original message in top-posted message
463 When a message contains a line looking something like:
465 ----- Original Message -----
467 emacs hides this and all subsequent lines as an "original message",
468 (allowing the user to click or press enter on the "original message"
469 button to display it again). This makes the handling of top-posted
470 citations work much like conventional citations.
472 New hooks for running code when tags are modified
474 Some users want to perform additional actions whenever a particular
475 tag is added/removed from a message. This could be used to, for
476 example, interface with some external spam-recognition training
477 tool. To facilitate this, two new hooks are added which can be
478 modified in the following settings of the notmuch customize group:
480 Notmuch Before Tag Hook
481 Notmuch After Tag Hook
483 New optional support for hiding some multipart/alternative parts
485 Many emails are sent with redundant content within a
486 multipart/alternative group (such as a text/plain part as well as a
487 text/html part). Users can configure the setting:
489 Notmuch Show All Multipart/Alternative Parts
491 to "off" in the notmuch customize group to have the interface
492 automatically hide some part alternatives (such as text/html
493 parts). This new part hiding is not configured by default yet
494 because there's not yet a simple way to re-display such a hidden
495 part if it is not actually redundant with a displayed part.
497 Better rendering of text/x-vcalendar parts
499 These parts are now displayed in a format suitable for use with the
502 Avoid getting confused by Subject and Author fields with newline characters
504 Replacing all characters with ASCII code less than 32 with a question mark.
506 Cleaner display of From line in email messages (remove double quotes,
507 and drop "name" if it's actually just a repeat of the email address).
509 Vim interface improvements
510 --------------------------
511 Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface:
513 * Using sendmail directly rather than mailx,
514 * Implementing archive in show view
515 * Add support to mark as read in show and search views
516 * Add delete commands
519 Bindings improvements
520 ---------------------
521 Ruby bindings are now much more complete
523 Including QUERY.sort, QUERY.to_s, MESSAGE.maildir_flags_to_tags,
524 MESSAGE.tags_to_maildir_flags, and MESSAGE.get_filenames
526 * Python bindings have been updated and extended
527 (docs online at http://packages.python.org/notmuch/)
530 - Message().get_filenames(),
531 - Message().tags_to_maildir_flags(),Message().maildir_flags_to_tags()
532 - list(Threads()) and list(Messages) works now
534 - Message().__cmp__() and __hash__()
535 These allow, for example:
538 As well as set arithmetic on Messages():
540 s1, s2= set(msgs1), set(msgs2)
545 - len(Messages()) as it exhausted the iterator.
546 Use len(list(Messages())) or
547 Query.count_messages() to get the length.
549 Added initial Go bindings in bindings/go
551 New build-system features
552 -------------------------
553 Added support for building in a directory other than the source directory
555 This can be used with the widely-supported idiom of simply running
556 the configure script from some other directory:
563 Fix to save configure options for future, implicit runs of configure
565 When a user updates the source (such as with "git pull") calling
566 "make" may cause an automatic re-run of the configure script. When
567 this happens, the configure script will automatically be called with
568 the same options the user originally passed in the most-recent
569 manual invocation of configure.
571 New test-suite feature
572 ----------------------
573 Binary for bash for running test suite now located via PATH.
575 The notmuch test suite requires a fairly recent version of bash (>=
576 bash 4). As some systems supply an older version of bash at
577 /bin/bash, the test suite is now updated to search $PATH to locate
578 the bash binary. This allows users of systems with old /bin/bash to
579 simply install bash >= 4 somewhere on $PATH before /bin and then use
582 Support for testing output with a trailing newline.
584 Previously, some tests would fail to notice a difference in the
585 presence/absence of a trailing newline in a program output, (which
586 has led to bugs in the past). Now, carefully-written tests (using
587 test_expect_equal_file rather than test_expect_equal) will detect
588 any change in the presence/absence of a trailing newline. Many tests
589 are updated to take advantage of this.
591 Avoiding accessing user's $HOME while running test suite
593 The test suite now carefully creates its own HOME directory. This
594 allows the test suite to be run with no existing HOME directory, (as
595 some build systems apparently do), and avoids test-suite differences
596 due to configuration files in the users HOME directory.
601 Output *all* files for "notmuch search --output=files"
603 For the cases where multiple files have the same Message ID,
604 previous versions of notmuch would output only one such file. This
605 command is now fixed to correctly output all files.
607 Fixed spurious search results from "overlapped" indexing of addresses
609 This fixed a bug where a search for:
611 to:user@elsewhere.com
613 would incorrectly match a message sent:
615 To: user@example,com, someone@elsewhere.com
617 Fix --output=json when search has no results
619 A bug present since notmuch 0.4 had caused searches with no results
620 to produce an invalid json object. This is now fixed to cleanly
621 return a valid json object representing an empty array "[]" as
624 fix the automatic detection of the From address for "notmuch reply"
625 from the Received headers in some cases.
627 Fix core dump on DragonFlyBSD due to -1 return value from
628 sysconf(_SC_GETPW_R_SIZE_MAX).
630 Cleaned up several memory leaks
632 Eliminated a few, rare segmentation faults and a double-free.
634 Fix libnotmuch library to only export notmuch API functions
636 Previous release of the notmuch library also exported some Xapian
637 C++ exception type symbols. These were never part of the library
638 interface and were never intended to be exported.
640 Emacs-interface bug fixes
641 -------------------------
642 Display any unexpected output or errors from "notmuch search" invocations
644 Previously any misformatted output or trailing error messages were
645 silently ignored. This output is now clearly displayed. This fix was
646 very helpful in identifying and fixing the bug described below.
648 Fix bug where some threads would be missing from large search results
650 When a search returned a "large" number of results, the emacs
651 interface was incorrectly dropping one thread every time the output
652 of the "notmuch search" process spanned the emacs read-buffer. This
655 Avoid re-compression of .gz files (and similar) when saving attachment
657 Emacs was being too clever for its own good and trying to
658 re-compress pre-compressed .gz files when saving such attachments
659 (potentially corrupting the attachment). The emacs interface is
660 fixed to avoid this bug.
662 Fix hiding of a message when a previously-hidden citation is visible
664 Previously the citation would remain visible in this case. This is
665 fixed so that hiding a message hides all parts.
667 Notmuch 0.5 (2010-11-11)
668 ========================
669 New, general features
670 ---------------------
671 Maildir-flag synchronization
673 Notmuch now knows how to synchronize flags in maildir filenames with
674 tags in the notmuch database. The following flag/tag mappings are
683 'S' unread (added when 'S' flag is not present)
685 The synchronization occurs in both directions, (for example, adding
686 the 'S' flag to a file will cause the "unread" tag to be added, and
687 adding the "replied" tag to a message will cause the file to be
688 renamed with an 'R' flag).
690 This synchronization is enabled by default for users of the
691 command-line interface, (though only files in directories named
692 "cur" or "new" will be renamed). It can be disabled by setting the
693 new maildir.synchronize_flags option in the configuration file. For
696 notmuch config set maildir.synchronize_flags false
698 Users upgrading may also want to run "notmuch setup" once (just
699 accept the existing configuration) to get a new, nicely-commented
700 [maildir] section added to the configuration file.
702 For users of the notmuch library, the new synchronization
703 functionality is available with the following two new functions:
705 notmuch_message_maildir_flags_to_tags
706 notmuch_message_tags_to_maildir_flags
708 It is anticipated that future improvements to this support will
709 allow for safe synchronization of the 'T' flag with the "deleted"
710 tag, as well as support for custom flag/tag mappings.
714 Support for querying multiple filenames for a single message
716 It is common for the mailstore to contain multiple files with the
717 same message ID. Previously, notmuch would always hide these
718 duplicate files, (returning a single, arbitrary filename with
719 notmuch_message_get_filename).
721 With this release, library users can access all filenames for a
722 message with the new function:
724 notmuch_message_get_filenames
726 Together with notmuch_filenames_valid, notmuch_filenames_get, and
727 notmuch_filenames_move_to_next it is now possible to iterate over
728 all available filenames for a given message.
730 New command-line features
731 -------------------------
732 New "notmuch show --format=raw" for getting at original email contents
734 This new feature allows for a fully-functional email client to be
735 built on top of the notmuch command-line without needing any direct
736 access to the mail store itself.
738 For example, it's now possible to run "emacs -f notmuch" on a local
739 machine with only ssh access to the mail store/notmuch database. To
740 do this, simply set the notmuch-command variable in emacs to the
741 name of a script containing:
743 ssh user@host notmuch "$@"
745 If the ssh client has enabled connection sharing (ControlMaster
746 option in OpenSSH), the emacs interface can be quite responsive this
751 Fix "notmuch search" to print nothing when nothing matches
753 The 0.4 release had a bug in which:
755 notmuch search <expression-with-no-matches>
757 would produce a single blank line of output, (where previous
758 versions would produce no output. This fix also causes a change in
759 the --format=json output, (which would previously produce "[]" and
760 now produces nothing).
762 Emacs interface improvements
763 ----------------------------
764 Fix to allow pipe ('|') command to work when using notmuch over ssh
766 Fix count of lines in hidden signatures.
768 Omit repeated subject lines in (collapsed) thread display.
770 Display current thread subject in a header line.
772 Provide a "c i" binding to copy a thread ID from the search view.
774 Allow for notmuch-fcc-dirs to have a value of nil.
776 Also, the more complex form of notmuch-fcc-dirs now has a slightly
777 different format. It no longer has a special first-element, fallback
778 string. Instead it's now a list of cons cells where the car of each
779 cell is a regular expression to be matched against the sender
780 address, and the cdr is the name of a folder to use for an FCC. So
781 the old fallback behavior can be achieved by including a final cell
782 of (".*" . "default-fcc-folder").
784 Vim interface improvements
785 --------------------------
786 Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface.
788 These include optimizations, support for newer versions of vim, fixed
789 support for sending mail on modern systems, new commands, and
794 Added initial ruby bindings in bindings/ruby
796 Notmuch 0.4 (2010-11-01)
797 ========================
798 New command-line features
799 -------------------------
800 notmuch search --output=(summary|threads|messages|tags|files)
802 This new option allows for particular items to be returned from
803 notmuch searches. The "summary" option is the default and behaves
804 just as "notmuch search" has historically behaved.
806 The new option values allow for thread IDs, message IDs, lists of
807 tags, and lists of filenames to be returned from searches. It is
808 expected that this new option will be very useful in shell
809 scripts. For example:
811 for file in $(notmuch search --output=files <search-terms>); do
812 <operations-on> "$file"
815 notmuch show --format=mbox <search-specification>
817 This new option allows for the messages matching a search
818 specification to be presented as an mbox. Specifically the "mboxrd"
819 format is used which allows for reversible quoting of lines
820 beginning with "From ". A reader should remove a single '>' from the
821 beginning of all lines beginning with one or more '>' characters
822 followed by the 5 characters "From ".
824 notmuch config [get|set] <section>.<item> [value ...]
826 The new top-level "config" command allows for any value in the
827 notmuch configuration file to be queried or set to a new value. Both
828 single-valued and multi-valued items are supported, as our any
829 custom items stored in the configuration file.
831 Avoid setting Bcc header in "notmuch reply"
833 We decided that this was a bit heavy-handed as the actual mail
834 user-agent should be responsible for setting any Bcc option. Also,
835 see below for the notmuch/emacs user-agent now setting an Fcc by
836 default rather than Bcc.
840 Add notmuch_query_get_query_string and notmuch_query_get_sort
842 These are simply functions for querying properties of a
843 notmuch_query_t object.
847 Enable Fcc of all sent messages by default (to "sent" directory)
849 All messages sent from the emacs interface will now be saved to the
850 notmuch mail store where they will be incorporated to the database
851 by the next "notmuch new". By default, messages are saved to the
852 "sent" directory at the top-level of the mail store. This directory
853 can be customized by means of the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" option in the
854 notmuch customize interface.
856 Ability to all open messages in a thread to a pipe
858 Historically, the '|' keybinding allows for piping a single message
859 to an external command. Now, by prefixing this key with a prefix
860 argument, (for example, by pressing "Control-U |"), all open
861 messages in the current thread will be sent to the external command.
863 Optional support for detecting inline patches
865 This hook is disabled by default but can be enabled with a checkbox
866 under "Notmuch Show Insert Text/Plain Hook" in the notmuch customize
867 interface. It allows for inline patches to be detected and treated
868 as if they were attachments, (with context-sensitive highlighting).
870 Automatically tag messages as "replied" when sending a reply
872 Messages replied to within the emacs interface will now be tagged as
873 "replied". This feature can easily be customized to add or remove
874 other tags as well. For example, a user might use a tag of
875 "needs-reply" and can configure this feature to automatically remove
876 that tag when replying. See "Notmuch Message Mark Replied" in the
877 notmuch customize interface.
879 Allow search-result color specifications to overlay each other
881 For example, one tag can specify the background color of matching
882 lines, while another can specify the foreground. With this change,
883 both settings will now be visible simultaneously, (which was not the
884 case in previous releases). See "Notmuch Search Line Faces" in the
885 notmuch customize interface.
887 Make hidden author names still available for incremental search.
889 When there is insufficient space to display all authors of a thread
890 in search results, the names of hidden authors are now still made
891 available to emacs' incremental search commands. As the user
892 searches, matching lines will temporarily expand to show the hidden
895 New binding of Control-TAB (works like TAB in reverse)
897 Many notmuch nodes already use TAB to navigate forward through
898 various items allowing actions, (message headers, email attachments,
899 etc.). The new Control-TAB binding operates similarly but in the
902 New build-system features
903 -------------------------
904 Various portability fixes have been applied
906 These include fixes for build failures on at least Solaris, FreeBSD,
907 and Fedora systems. We're hopeful that the notmuch code base is now
908 more portable than ever before.
910 Arrange for libnotmuch to be found automatically after make install
912 The notmuch build system is now careful to help the user avoid
913 errors of the form "libnotmuch.so could not be found" immediately
914 after installing. This support takes two forms:
916 1. If the library is installed to a system directory,
917 (configured in /etc/ld.so.conf), then "make install" will
918 automatically run ldconfig.
920 2. If the library is installed to a non-system directory, the
921 build system adds a DR_RUNPATH entry to the final binary
922 pointing to the directory to which the library is installed.
924 When this support works, the user should be able to run notmuch
925 immediately after "make install", without any errors trying to find
926 the notmuch library, and without having to manually set environment
927 variables such as LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
929 Check compiler/linker options before using them
931 The configure script now carefully checks that any desired
932 compilation options, (whether for enabling compiler warnings, or for
933 embedding rpath, etc.), are supported. Only supported options are
934 used in the resulting Makefile.
936 New test-suite features
937 -----------------------
938 New modularization of test suite.
940 Thanks to a gracious relicensing of the test-suite infrastructure
941 from the git project, notmuch now has a modular test suite. This
942 provides the ability to run individual sections of the test suite
943 rather than the whole things. It also provides better summary of
944 test results, with support for tests that are expected to fail
945 (BROKEN and FIXED) in addition to PASS and FAIL. Finally, it makes
946 it easy to run the test suite within valgrind (pass --valgrind to
947 notmuch-test or to any sub-script) which has been very useful.
949 New testing of emacs interface.
951 The test suite has been augmented to allow automated testing of the
952 emacs interfaces. So far, this includes basic searches, display of
953 threads, and tag manipulation. This also includes a test that a new
954 message can successfully be sent out through a (dummy) SMTP server
955 and that said message is successfully integrated into the notmuch
956 database via the FCC setting.
960 Fix potential corruption of database when "notmuch new " is interrupted.
962 Previously, an interruption of "notmuch new" would (rarely) result
963 in a corrupt database. The corruption would manifest itself by a
964 persistent error of the form:
966 document ID of 1234 has no thread ID
968 The message-adding code has been carefully audited and reworked to
969 avoid this sort of corruption regardless of when it is interrupted.
971 Fix failure with extremely long message ID headers.
973 Previously, a message with an extremely long message ID, (say, more
974 than 300 characters), would fail to be added to notmuch, (triggering
975 Xapian exceptions). This has now been fixed.
977 Fix for messages with "charset=unknown-8bit"
979 Previously, messages with this charset would cause notmuch to emit a
980 GMime warning, (which would then trip up emacs or other interfaces
981 parsing the notmuch results).
983 Fix notmuch_query_search_threads function to return NULL on any exception
985 Fix "notmuch search" to return non-zero if notmuch_query_search_threads fails
987 Previously, this command could confusingly report a Xapian
988 exception, yet still return an error code of 0. It now correctly
989 returns a failing error code of 1 in this case.
993 Fix to handle a message with a subject containing, for example "[1234]"
995 Previously, a message subject containing a sequence of digits within
996 square brackets would cause the emacs interface to mis-parse the
997 output of "notmuch search". This would result in the message being
998 mis-displayed and prevent the user from manipulating the message in
1001 Fix to correctly handle message IDs containing ".."
1003 The emacs interface now properly quotes message IDs to avoid a
1004 Xapian bug in which the ".." within a message ID would be
1005 misinterpreted as a numeric range specification.
1007 Python-binding fixes
1008 --------------------
1009 The python bindings for notmuch have been updated to work with python3.
1011 Debian-specific fixes
1012 ---------------------
1013 Fix emacs initialization so "M-x notmuch" works for users by default.
1015 Now, a new Debian user can immediately run "emacs -f notmuch" after
1016 "apt-get install notmuch". Previously, the user would have had to
1017 edit the ~/.emacs file to add "(require 'notmuch)" before this would
1020 Notmuch 0.3.1 (2010-04-27)
1021 ==========================
1024 Fix an infinite loop in "notmuch reply"
1026 This bug could be triggered by replying to a message where the
1027 user's primary email address did not appear in the To: header and
1028 the user had not configured any secondary email addresses. The bug
1029 was a simple re-use of the same iterator variable in nested loops.
1031 Fix a potential SEGV in "notmuch search"
1033 This bug could be triggered by an author name ending in a ','.
1034 Admittedly - that's almost certainly a spam email, but we never
1035 want notmuch to crash.
1039 Fix calculations for line wrapping in the primary "notmuch" view.
1041 Fix Fcc support to prompt to create a directory if the specified Fcc
1042 directory does not exist.
1046 Fix build on OpenSolaris (at least) due to missing 'extern "C"' block.
1048 Without this, the C++ sources could not find strcasestr and the
1049 final linking of notmuch would fail.
1051 Notmuch 0.3 (2010-04-27)
1052 ========================
1053 New command-line features
1054 -------------------------
1055 User-configurable tags for new messages
1057 A new "new.tags" option is available in the configuration file to
1058 determine which tags are applied to new messages. Run "notmuch
1059 setup" to generate new documentation within ~/.notmuch-config on how
1060 to specify this value.
1062 Threads search results named based on subjects that match search
1064 This means that when new mails arrived to a thread you've previously
1065 read, and the new mails have a new subject, you will see that
1066 subject in the search results rather than the old subject.
1068 Faster operation of "notmuch tag" (avoid unneeded sorting)
1070 Since the user just wants to tag all matching messages, we can make
1071 things perform a bit faster by avoiding the sort.
1073 Even Better guessing of From: header for "notmuch reply"
1075 Notmuch now looks at a number of headers when trying to figure out
1076 the best From: header to use in a reply. This is helpful if you have
1077 several configured email addresses, and you also subscribe to various
1078 mailing lists with different addresses, (so that mails you are
1079 replying to won't always include your subscribed address in the To:
1082 Indication of author names that match a search
1084 When notmuch displays threads as the result of a search, it now
1085 lists the authors that match the search before listing the other
1086 authors in the thread. It inserts a pipe '|' symbol between the last
1087 matching and first non-matching author. This is especially useful in
1088 a search that includes tag:unread. Now the authors of the unread
1089 messages in the thread are listed first.
1091 New: Python bindings
1092 --------------------
1093 Sebastian Spaeth has contributed his python bindings for the notmuch
1094 library to the central repository. These bindings were previously
1095 known as "cnotmuch" within python but have now been renamed to be
1096 accessible with a simple, and more official-looking "import notmuch".
1098 The bindings have already proven very useful as people proficient in
1099 python have been able to easily develop programs to do notmuch-based
1100 searches for email-address completion, maildir-flag synchronization,
1103 These bindings are available within the bindings/python directory, but
1104 are not yet integrated into the top-level Makefiles, nor the top-level
1105 package-building scripts. Improvements are welcome.
1107 Emacs interface improvements
1108 ----------------------------
1109 An entirely new initial view for notmuch, (friendly yet powerful)
1111 Some of us call the new view "notmuch hello" but you can get at it
1112 by simply calling "emacs -f notmuch". The new view provides a search
1113 bar where new searches can be performed. It also displays a list of
1114 recent searches, along with a button to save any of these, giving it
1115 a new name as a "saved search". Many people find these "saved
1116 searches" one of the most convenient ways of organizing their mail,
1117 (providing all of the features of "folders" in other mail clients,
1118 but without any of the disadvantages).
1120 Finally, this view can also optionally display all of the tags that
1121 exist in the database, along with a count for each tag, and a custom
1122 search of messages with that tag that's simply a click (or keypress)
1125 Note: For users that liked the original mode of "emacs -f notmuch"
1126 immediately displaying a particular search result, we
1127 recommend instead running something like:
1129 emacs --eval '(notmuch search "tag:inbox" t)'
1131 The "t" means to sort the messages in an "oldest first" order,
1132 (as notmuch would do previously by default). You can also
1133 leave that off to have your search results in "newest first"
1136 Full-featured "customize" support for configuring notmuch
1138 Notmuch now plugs in well to the emacs "customize" mode to make it
1139 much simpler to find things about the notmuch interface that can be
1140 tweaked by the user.
1142 You can get to this mode by starting at the main "Customize" menu in
1143 emacs, then browsing through "Applications", "Mail", and
1144 "Notmuch". Or you can go straight to "M-x customize-group"
1147 Once you're at the customize screen, you'll see a list of documented
1148 options that can be manipulated along with checkboxes, drop-down
1149 selectors, and text-entry boxes for configuring the various
1152 Support for doing tab-completion of email addresses
1154 This support currently relies on an external program,
1155 (notmuch-addresses), that is not yet shipped with notmuch
1156 itself. But multiple, suitable implementations of this program have
1157 already been written that generate address completions by doing
1158 notmuch searches of your email collection. For example, providing
1159 first those addresses that you have composed messages to in the
1162 One such program (implemented in python with the python bindings to
1163 notmuch) is available via:
1165 git clone http://jkr.acm.jhu.edu/git/notmuch_addresses.git
1167 Install that program as notmuch-addresses on your PATH, and then
1168 hitting TAB on a partial email address or name within the To: or Cc:
1169 line of an email message will provide matching completions.
1171 Support for file-based (Fcc) delivery of sent messages to mail store
1173 This isn't yet enabled by default. To enable this, one will have to
1174 set the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" setting within the notmuch customize
1175 screen, (see its documentation there for details). We anticipate
1176 making this automatic in a future release.
1178 New 'G' key binding to trigger mail refresh (G == "Get new mail")
1180 The 'G' key works wherever '=' works. Before refreshing the screen
1181 it calls an external program that can be used to poll email servers,
1182 run notmuch new and setup specific tags for the new emails. The
1183 script to be called should be configured with the "Notmuch Poll
1184 Script" setting in the customize interface. This script will
1185 typically invoke "notmuch new" and then perhaps several "notmuch
1188 Implement emacs message display with the JSON output from notmuch.
1190 This is much more robust than the previous implementation, (where
1191 some HTML mails and mail quoting the notmuch code with the delimiter
1192 characters in it would cause the parser to fall over).
1194 Better handling of HTML messages and MIME attachments (inline images!)
1196 Allow for any MIME parts that emacs can display to be displayed
1197 inline. This includes inline viewing of image attachments, (provided
1198 the window is large enough to fit the image at its natural size).
1200 Much more robust handling of HTML messages. Currently both text/plain
1201 and text/html alternates will be rendered next to each other. In a
1202 future release, users will be able to decide to see only one or the
1203 other representation.
1205 Each attachment now has its own button so that attachments can be
1206 saved individually (the 'w' key is still available to save all
1209 Customizable support for tidying of text/plain message content
1211 Many new functions are available for tidying up message
1212 content. These include options such as wrapping long lines,
1213 compressing duplicate blank lines, etc.
1215 Most of these are disabled by default, but can easily be enabled by
1216 clicking the available check boxes under the "Notmuch Show Insert
1217 Text/Plain Hook" within the notmuch customize screen.
1219 New support for searchable citations (even when hidden)
1221 When portions of overly-long citations are hidden, the contents of
1222 these citations will still be available for emacs' standard
1223 "incremental search" functions. When the search matches any portion
1224 of a hidden citation, the citation will become visible temporarily
1225 to display the search result.
1227 More flexible handling of header visibility
1229 As an answer to complaints from many users, the To, Cc, and Date
1230 headers of messages are no longer hidden by default. For those users
1231 that liked that these were hidden, a new "Notmuch Messages Headers
1232 Visible" option in the customize interface can be set to nil. The
1233 visibility of headers can still be toggled on a per-message basis
1234 with the 'h' keybinding.
1236 For users that don't want to see some subset of those headers, the
1237 new "Notmuch Message Headers" variable can be customized to list
1238 only those headers that should be present in the display of a message.
1240 The Return key now toggles message visibility anywhere
1242 Previously this worked only on the first summary-line of a message.
1244 Customizable formatting of search results
1246 The user can easily customize the order, width, and formatting of
1247 the various fields in a "notmuch search" buffer. See the "Notmuch
1248 Search Result Format" section of the customize interface.
1250 Generate nicer names for search buffers when using a saved search.
1252 Add a notmuch User-Agent header when sending mail from notmuch/emacs.
1254 New keybinding (M-Ret) to open all collapsed messages in a thread.
1258 Provide a new NOTMUCH_SORT_UNSORTED value for queries
1260 This can be somewhat faster when sorting simply isn't desired. For
1261 example when collecting a set of messages that will all be
1262 manipulated identically, (adding a tag, removing a tag, deleting the
1263 messages), then there's no advantage to sorting the messages by
1268 Fix to compile against GMime 2.6
1270 Previously notmuch insisted on being able to find GMime 2.4, (even
1271 though GMime 2.6 would have worked all along).
1273 Fix configure script to accept (and ignore) various standard options.
1275 For example, those that the Gentoo build scripts expect configure to
1276 accept are now all accepted.
1280 A large number of new tests for the many new features.
1282 Better display of output from failed tests.
1284 Now shows failures with diff rather than forcing the user to gaze at
1285 complete actual and expected output looking for deviation.
1287 Notmuch 0.2 (2010-04-16)
1288 ========================
1289 This is the second release of the notmuch mail system, with actual
1290 detailed release notes this time!
1292 This release consists of a number of minor new features that make
1293 notmuch more pleasant to use, and a few fairly major bug fixes.
1295 We didn't quite hit our release target of "about a week" from the 0.1
1296 release, (0.2 is happening 11 days after 0.1), but we hope to do
1297 better for next week. Look forward to some major features coming to
1298 notmuch in subsequent releases.
1304 Better guessing of From: header.
1306 Notmuch now tries harder to guess which configured address should be
1307 used as the From: line in a "notmuch reply". It will examine the
1308 Received: headers if it fails to find any configured address in To:
1309 or Cc:. This allows it to often choose the correct address even when
1310 replying to a message sent to a mailing list, and not directly to a
1313 Make "notmuch count" with no arguments count all messages
1315 Previously, it was hard to construct a search term that was
1316 guaranteed to match all messages.
1318 Provide a new special-case search term of "*" to match all messages.
1320 This can be used in any command accepting a search term, such as
1321 "notmuch search '*'". Note that you'll want to take care that the
1322 shell doesn't expand * against the current files. And note that the
1323 support for "*" is a special case. It's only meaningful as a single
1324 search term and loses its special meaning when combined with any
1327 Automatically detect thread connections even when a parent message is
1330 Previously, if two or more message were received with a common
1331 parent, but that parent was not received, then these messages would
1332 not be recognized as belonging to the same thread. This is now fixed
1333 so that such messages are properly connected in a thread.
1337 Fix potential data loss in "notmuch new" with SIGINT
1339 One code path in "notmuch new" was not properly handling
1340 SIGINT. Previously, this could lead to messages being removed from
1341 the database (and their tags being lost) if the user pressed
1342 Control-C while "notmuch new" was working.
1344 Fix segfault when a message includes a MIME part that is empty.
1346 Fix handling of non-ASCII characters with --format=json
1348 Previously, characters outside the range of 7-bit ASCII were
1349 silently dropped from the JSON output. This led to corrupted display
1350 of utf-8 content in the upcoming notmuch web-based frontends.
1352 Fix headers to be properly decoded in "notmuch reply"
1354 Previously, the user might see:
1356 Subject: Re: =?iso-8859-2?q?Rozlu=E8ka?=
1360 Subject: Re: Rozlučka
1362 The former text is properly encoded to be RFC-compliant SMTP, will
1363 be sent correctly, and will be properly decoded by the
1364 recipient. But the user trying to edit the reply would likely be
1365 unable to read or edit that field in its encoded form.
1367 Emacs client features
1368 ---------------------
1369 Show the last few lines of citations as well as the first few lines.
1371 It's often the case that the last sentence of a citation is what is
1372 being replied to directly, so the last few lines are often much more
1373 important. The number of lines shown at the beginning and end of any
1374 citation can be configured, (notmuch-show-citation-lines-prefix and
1375 notmuch-show-citation-lines-suffix).
1377 The '+' and '-' commands in the search view can now add and remove
1380 Selective bulk tagging is now possible by selecting a region of
1381 threads and then using either the '+' or '-' keybindings. Bulk
1382 tagging is still available for all threads matching the current
1383 search with the '*' binding.
1385 More meaningful buffer names for thread-view buffers.
1387 Notmuch now uses the Subject of the thread as the buffer
1388 name. Previously it was using the thread ID, which is a meaningless
1391 Provide for customized colors of threads in search view based on tags.
1393 See the documentation of notmuch-search-line-faces, (or us "M-x
1394 customize" and browse to the "notmuch" group within "Applications"
1395 and "Mail"), for details on how to configure this colorization.
1397 Build-system features
1398 ---------------------
1399 Add support to properly build libnotmuch on Darwin systems (OS X).
1401 Add support to configure for many standard options.
1403 We include actual support for:
1405 --includedir --mandir --sysconfdir
1407 And accept and silently ignore several more:
1409 --build --infodir --libexecdir --localstatedir
1410 --disable-maintainer-mode --disable-dependency-tracking
1412 Install emacs client in "make install" rather than requiring a
1413 separate "make install-emacs".
1415 Automatically compute versions numbers between releases.
1417 This support uses the git-describe notation, so a version such as
1418 0.1-144-g43cbbfc indicates a version that is 144 commits since the
1419 0.1 release and is available as git commit "43cbbfc".
1421 Add a new "make test" target to run the test suite and actually verify
1424 Notmuch 0.1 (2010-04-05)
1425 ========================
1426 This is the first release of the notmuch mail system.
1428 It includes the libnotmuch library, the notmuch command-line
1429 interface, and an emacs-based interface to notmuch.
1431 Note: Notmuch will work best with Xapian 1.0.18 (or later) or Xapian
1432 1.1.4 (or later). Previous versions of Xapian (whether 1.0 or 1.1) had
1433 a performance bug that made notmuch very slow when modifying
1434 tags. This would cause distracting pauses when reading mail while
1435 notmuch would wait for Xapian when removing the "inbox" and "unread"
1436 tags from messages in a thread.