1 Notmuch 0.9 (2011-10-01)
2 ========================
7 Correct handling of interruptions during "notmuch new"
9 "notmuch new" now operates as a series of small, self-consistent
10 transactions, so it can correctly resume after an interruption or
11 crash. Previously, interruption could lose existing tags, fail to
12 detect messages on resume, or leave the database in a state
13 temporarily or permanently inconsistent with the mail store.
20 notmuch_database_begin_atomic and notmuch_database_end_atomic allow
21 multiple database operations to be performed atomically.
23 notmuch_database_find_message_by_filename does exactly what it says.
25 Python bindings changes
26 -----------------------
28 - Re-encode python unicode objects to utf-8 before passing back to
30 - Support Database().begin_atomic()/end_atomic()
31 - Support Database().find_message_by_filename()
32 NB! This needs a db opened in READ-WRITE mode currently, or it will crash
33 the python process. The is a limitation (=bug) of the underlying libnotmuch.
34 - Fixes where we would not throw NotmuchErrors when we should (Justus Winter)
39 Wrap new library functions notmuch_database_{begin,end}_atomic,
40 and add new exception Notmuch::UnbalancedAtomicError. Rename destroy
41 to destroy! according to Ruby naming conventions.
44 Notmuch 0.8 (2011-09-10)
45 ========================
47 Improved handling of message/rfc822 parts
49 Both in the CLI and the emacs interface. Output of rfc822 parts now
50 includes the primary headers, as well as the body and all subparts.
51 Output of the completely raw rfc822-formatted message, including all
52 headers, is unfortunately not yet supported (but hopefully will be
55 Improved Build system portability
57 Certain parts of the shell script generating notmuch.sym were
58 specific to the GNU versions of sed and nm. The new version should
59 be more portable to e.g. OpenBSD.
61 Documentation update for Ruby bindings
63 Added documentation, typo fixes, and improved support for rdoc.
65 Unicode, iterator, PEP8 changes for python bindings
67 - PEP8 (code formatting) changes for python files.
68 - Remove Tags.__len__ ; see 0.6 release notes for motivation.
69 - Decode headers as UTF8, encode (unicode) database paths as UTF8.
71 Notmuch 0.7 (2011-08-01)
72 ========================
74 Vim interface improvements
75 --------------------------
77 Jason Woofenden provided a number of bug fixes for the Vim interface
79 * fix citation/signature fold lengths
80 * fix cig/cit parsing within multipart/*
81 * fix on-screen instructions for show-signature
82 * fix from list reformatting in search view
83 * fix space key: now archives (did opposite)
85 Uwe Kleine-König contributed
87 * use full path for sendmail/doc fix
88 * fix compose temp file name
90 Python Bindings changes
91 -----------------------
93 Sebastian Spaeth contributed two changes related to unicode and UTF8:
95 * message tags are now explicitly unicode
96 * query string is encoded as a UTF8 byte string
98 Build-System improvments
99 ------------------------
101 Generate notmuch.sym after the relevant object files
103 This fixes a bug in parallel building. Thanks to Thomas Jost for the
106 Notmuch 0.6.1 (2011-07-17)
107 ==========================
112 Re-export Xapian exception typeinfo symbols.
114 It turned out our aggressive symbol hiding caused problems for
115 people running gcc 4.4.5.
117 Notmuch 0.6 (2011-07-01)
118 =======================
119 New, general features
120 ---------------------
121 Folder-based searching
123 Notmuch queries can now include a search term to match the
124 directories in which mail files are stored (within the mail
125 storage). The syntax is as follows:
129 For example, one might use things such as:
135 to match any path containing a directory "spam", "work/todo", or
136 containing a directory starting with "2011-", respectively.
138 This feature is particularly useful for users of delivery-agent
139 software (such as procmail or maildrop) that is filtering mail and
140 delivering it to particular folders, or users of systems such as
141 Gmail that use filesystem directories to indicate message tags.
143 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
144 notmuch will be searchable with folder: terms. In order to enable
145 this feature for all mail, the entire notmuch index will need to be
148 notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
149 # Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
151 notmuch restore notmuch.dump
155 Both the command line interface and the emacs-interface have new
156 support for PGP/MIME, detailed below. Thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor
157 and Jameson Graef Rollins for making this happen.
159 New, automatic tags: "signed" and "encrypted"
161 These tags will automatically be applied to messages containing
162 multipart/signed and multipart/encrypted parts.
164 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
165 notmuch will receive these tags.
167 New command-line features
168 -------------------------
169 Add new "notmuch show --verify" option for signature verification
171 This option instruct notmuch to verify the signature of
172 PGP/MIME-signed parts.
174 Add new "notmuch show --decrypt" and "notmuch reply --decrypt" options
176 This option instructs notmuch to decrypt PGP/MIME-encrypted parts.
177 Note that this feature currently requires gpg-agent and a passphrase entry
178 tool (e.g. pinentry-gtk or pinentry-curses).
180 Proper nesting of multipart parts in "notmuch show" output
182 MIME parts are now display with proper nesting to reflect original
183 MIME hierarchy of a message. This allows clients to correctly
184 analyze the MIME structure, (such as, for example, determining to
185 which parts a signature part applies).
187 Add new "notmuch show --part" option
189 This is a replacement for the older "notmuch part" command, (which
190 is now deprecated—it should still work as always, but is no longer
191 documented). Putting part output under "notmuch show" allows for all
192 of the "notmuch show" options to be applied when extracting a single
193 part, (such as --format=json for extracting a message part with JSON
196 Deprecate "notmuch search-tags", (in favor of "notmuch search --output=tags *")
198 The "notmuch search-tags" sub-command has been redundant since the
199 addition of the --output=tags option to "notmuch search". We now
200 make that more clear by deprecating "notmuch search-tags", (dropping
201 it from the documentation). We do continue to support the old syntax
202 by translating it internally to the new call.
204 Performance improvements
205 ------------------------
206 Faster searches (by doing fewer searches to construct threads)
208 Whenever a user asks for search results as threads, notmuch first
209 performs a search for messages matching the query, then performs
210 additional searches to find other messages in the resulting threads.
212 Removing inefficiencies and redundancies in these secondary searches
213 results in a measured speedups of 1.5x for a typical search.
215 Faster searches (by doing fewer passes to gather message data)
217 Optimizing Xapian data access patterns (using a single pass to get
218 all message-document data rather than a pass for each data type)
219 results in a measured speedup of 1.7x for a typical search.
221 The benefits of this optimization combine with the preceding
222 optimization. With both in place, Austin Clements measured a speedup
223 of 2.5x for a search of all messages in his inbox (was 4.5s, now
224 1.8s). Thanks, Austin!
226 Faster initial indexing
228 More efficient indexing of new messages results in a measured
229 speedup of 1.4x for the initial indexing of 3 GB of mail (1h 14m
230 rather than 1h 46m). Thanks to Austin Clements and Michal Sojka.
232 Make "notmuch new" faster for unchanged directories
234 Optimizing to not do any further examinations of sub-directories
235 when the filesystem indicates that a directory is unchanged from the
236 last "notmuch new" results in measured speedups of 8.5 for the "No
237 new mail" case, (was 0.77s, now 0.09s). Thanks to Karel Zak.
239 New emacs-interface features
240 ----------------------------
242 Support for PGP/MIME (GnuPG)
244 Automatically indicate validity of signatures for multipart/signed
245 messages. Automatically display decrypted content for
246 multipart/encrypted messages. See the emacs variable
247 notmuch-crypto-process-mime for more information. Note that this
248 needs gpg-agent and a pinentry tool just as the command line tools.
249 Also note there is no support SMIME yet.
251 Output of pipe command is now displayed if pipe command fails
253 This is extremely useful in the common use case of piping a patch to
254 "git am". If git fails to cleanly merge the patch the error messages
255 from the failed merge are now clearly displayed to the user, (where
256 previously they were silently hidden from the user).
258 User-selectable From address
260 A user can choose which configured email addresses should be used as
261 the From address whenever composing a new message. To do so, simply
262 press C-u before the command which will open a new message. Emacs
263 will prompt for the from address to use.
265 The user can customize the "Notmuch Identities" setting in the
266 notmuch customize group in order to use addresses other than those in
267 the notmuch configuration file if desired.
269 The user can also choose to always be prompted for the from address
270 when composing a new message (without having to use C-u) by setting
271 the "Notmuch Always Prompt For Sender" option in the notmuch
274 Hiding of repeated subjects in collapsed thread view
276 In notmuch-show mode, if a collapsed message has the same subject as
277 its parent, the subject is not shown.
279 Automatic detection and hiding of original message in top-posted message
281 When a message contains a line looking something like:
283 ----- Original Message -----
285 emacs hides this and all subsequent lines as an "original message",
286 (allowing the user to click or press enter on the "original message"
287 button to display it again). This makes the handling of top-posted
288 citations work much like conventional citations.
290 New hooks for running code when tags are modified
292 Some users want to perform additional actions whenever a particular
293 tag is added/removed from a message. This could be used to, for
294 example, interface with some external spam-recognition training
295 tool. To facilitate this, two new hooks are added which can be
296 modified in the following settings of the notmuch customize group:
298 Notmuch Before Tag Hook
299 Notmuch After Tag Hook
301 New optional support for hiding some multipart/alternative parts
303 Many emails are sent with redundant content within a
304 multipart/alternative group (such as a text/plain part as well as a
305 text/html part). Users can configure the setting:
307 Notmuch Show All Multipart/Alternative Parts
309 to "off" in the notmuch customize group to have the interface
310 automatically hide some part alternatives (such as text/html
311 parts). This new part hiding is not configured by default yet
312 because there's not yet a simple way to re-display such a hidden
313 part if it is not actually redundant with a displayed part.
315 Better rendering of text/x-vcalendar parts
317 These parts are now displayed in a format suitable for use with the
320 Avoid getting confused by Subject and Author fields with newline characters
322 Replacing all characters with ASCII code less than 32 with a question mark.
324 Cleaner display of From line in email messages (remove double quotes,
325 and drop "name" if it's actually just a repeat of the email address).
327 Vim interface improvements
328 --------------------------
329 Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface:
331 * Using sendmail directly rather than mailx,
332 * Implementing archive in show view
333 * Add support to mark as read in show and search views
334 * Add delete commands
337 Bindings improvements
338 ---------------------
339 Ruby bindings are now much more complete
341 Including QUERY.sort, QUERY.to_s, MESSAGE.maildir_flags_to_tags,
342 MESSAGE.tags_to_maildir_flags, and MESSAGE.get_filenames
344 * Python bindings have been upodated and extended
345 (docs online at http://packages.python.org/notmuch/)
348 - Message().get_filenames(),
349 - Message().tags_to_maildir_flags(),Message().maildir_flags_to_tags()
350 - list(Threads()) and list(Messages) works now
352 - Message().__cmp__() and __hash__()
353 These allow, for example:
356 As well as set arithmetic on Messages():
358 s1, s2= set(msgs1), set(msgs2)
363 - len(Messages()) as it exausted the iterator.
364 Use len(list(Messages())) or
365 Query.count_messages() to get the length.
367 Added initial Go bindings in bindings/go
369 New build-system features
370 -------------------------
371 Added support for building in a directory other than the source directory
373 This can be used with the widely-supported idiom of simply running
374 the configure script from some other directory:
381 Fix to save configure options for future, implicit runs of configure
383 When a user updates the source (such as with "git pull") calling
384 "make" may cause an automatic re-run of the configure script. When
385 this happens, the configure script will automatically be called with
386 the same options the user originally passed in the most-recent
387 manual invocation of configure.
389 New test-suite feature
390 ----------------------
391 Binary for bash for running test suite now located via PATH.
393 The notmuch test suite requires a fairly recent version of bash (>=
394 bash 4). As some systems supply an older version of bash at
395 /bin/bash, the test suite is now updated to search $PATH to locate
396 the bash binary. This allows users of systems with old /bin/bash to
397 simply install bash >= 4 somewhere on $PATH before /bin and then use
400 Support for testing output with a trailing newline.
402 Previously, some tests would fail to notice a difference in the
403 presence/absence of a trailing newline in a program output, (which
404 has led to bugs in the past). Now, carefully-written tests (using
405 test_expect_equal_file rather than test_expect_equal) will detect
406 any change in the presence/absence of a trailing newline. Many tests
407 are updated to take advantage of this.
409 Avoiding accessing user's $HOME while running test suite
411 The test suite now carefully creates its own HOME directory. This
412 allows the test suite to be run with no existing HOME directory, (as
413 some build systems apparently do), and avoids test-suite differences
414 due to configuration files in the users HOME directory.
419 Output *all* files for "notmuch search --output=files"
421 For the cases where multiple files have the same Message ID,
422 previous versions of notmuch would output only one such file. This
423 command is now fixed to correctly output all files.
425 Fixed spurious search results from "overlapped" indexing of addresses
427 This fixed a bug where a search for:
429 to:user@elsewhere.com
431 would incorrectly match a message sent:
433 To: user@example,com, someone@elsewhere.com
435 Fix --output=json when search has no results
437 A bug present since notmuch 0.4 had caused searches with no results
438 to produce an invalid json object. This is now fixed to cleanly
439 return a valid json object representing an empty array "[]" as
442 fix the automatic detection of the From address for "notmuch reply"
443 from the Received headers in some cases.
445 Fix core dump on DragonFlyBSD due to -1 return value from
446 sysconf(_SC_GETPW_R_SIZE_MAX).
448 Cleaned up several memory leaks
450 Eliminated a few, rare segmentation faults and a double-free.
452 Fix libnotmuch library to only export notmuch API functions
454 Previous release of the notmuch library also exported some Xapian
455 C++ exception type symbols. These were never part of the library
456 interface and were never intended to be exported.
458 Emacs-interface bug fixes
459 -------------------------
460 Display any unexpected output or errors from "notmuch search" invocations
462 Previously any misformatted output or trailing error messages were
463 silently ignored. This output is now clearly displayed. This fix was
464 very helpful in identifying and fixing the bug described below.
466 Fix bug where some threads would be missing from large search results
468 When a search returned a "large" number of results, the emacs
469 interface was incorrectly dropping one thread every time the output
470 of the "notmuch search" process spanned the emacs read-buffer. This
473 Avoid re-compression of .gz files (and similar) when saving attachment
475 Emacs was being too clever for its own good and trying to
476 re-compress pre-compressed .gz files when saving such attachments
477 (potentially corrupting the attachment). The emacs interface is
478 fixed to avoid this bug.
480 Fix hiding of a message when a previously-hidden citation is visible
482 Previously the citation would remain visible in this case. This is
483 fixed so that hiding a message hides all parts.
485 Notmuch 0.5 (2010-11-11)
486 ========================
487 New, general features
488 ---------------------
489 Maildir-flag synchronization
491 Notmuch now knows how to synchronize flags in maildir filenames with
492 tags in the notmuch database. The following flag/tag mappings are
501 'S' unread (added when 'S' flag is not present)
503 The synchronization occurs in both directions, (for example, adding
504 the 'S' flag to a file will cause the "unread" tag to be added, and
505 adding the "replied" tag to a message will cause the file to be
506 renamed with an 'R' flag).
508 This synchronization is enabled by default for users of the
509 command-line interface, (though only files in directories named
510 "cur" or "new" will be renamed). It can be disabled by setting the
511 new maildir.synchronize_flags option in the configuration file. For
514 notmuch config set maildir.synchronize_flags false
516 Users upgrading may also want to run "notmuch setup" once (just
517 accept the existing configuration) to get a new, nicely-commented
518 [maildir] section added to the configuration file.
520 For users of the notmuch library, the new synchronization
521 functionality is available with the following two new functions:
523 notmuch_message_maildir_flags_to_tags
524 notmuch_message_tags_to_maildir_flags
526 It is anticipated that future improvements to this support will
527 allow for safe synchronization of the 'T' flag with the "deleted"
528 tag, as well as support for custom flag/tag mappings.
532 Support for querying multiple filenames for a single message
534 It is common for the mailstore to contain multiple files with the
535 same message ID. Previously, notmuch would always hide these
536 duplicate files, (returning a single, arbitrary filename with
537 notmuch_message_get_filename).
539 With this release, library users can access all filenames for a
540 message with the new function:
542 notmuch_message_get_filenames
544 Together with notmuch_filenames_valid, notmuch_filenames_get, and
545 notmuch_filenames_move_to_next it is now possible to iterate over
546 all available filenames for a given message.
548 New command-line features
549 -------------------------
550 New "notmuch show --format=raw" for getting at original email contents
552 This new feature allows for a fully-functional email client to be
553 built on top of the notmuch command-line without needing any direct
554 access to the mail store itself.
556 For example, it's now possible to run "emacs -f notmuch" on a local
557 machine with only ssh access to the mail store/notmuch database. To
558 do this, simply set the notmuch-command variable in emacs to the
559 name of a script containing:
561 ssh user@host notmuch "$@"
563 If the ssh client has enabled connection sharing (ControlMaster
564 option in OpenSSH), the emacs interface can be quite responsive this
569 Fix "notmuch search" to print nothing when nothing matches
571 The 0.4 release had a bug in which:
573 notmuch search <expression-with-no-matches>
575 would produce a single blank line of output, (where previous
576 versions would produce no output. This fix also causes a change in
577 the --format=json output, (which would previously produce "[]" and
578 now produces nothing).
580 Emacs interface improvements
581 ----------------------------
582 Fix to allow pipe ('|') command to work when using notmuch over ssh
584 Fix count of lines in hidden signatures.
586 Omit repeated subject lines in (collapsed) thread display.
588 Display current thread subject in a header line.
590 Provide a "c i" binding to copy a thread ID from the search view.
592 Allow for notmuch-fcc-dirs to have a value of nil.
594 Also, the more complex form of notmuch-fcc-dirs now has a slightly
595 different format. It no longer has a special first-element, fallback
596 string. Instead it's now a list of cons cells where the car of each
597 cell is a regular expression to be matched against the sender
598 address, and the cdr is the name of a folder to use for an FCC. So
599 the old fallback behavior can be achieved by including a final cell
600 of (".*" . "default-fcc-folder").
602 Vim interface improvements
603 --------------------------
604 Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface.
606 These include optimizations, support for newer versions of vim, fixed
607 support for sending mail on modern systems, new commands, and
612 Added initial ruby bindings in bindings/ruby
614 Notmuch 0.4 (2010-11-01)
615 ========================
616 New command-line features
617 -------------------------
618 notmuch search --output=(summary|threads|messages|tags|files)
620 This new option allows for particular items to be returned from
621 notmuch searches. The "summary" option is the default and behaves
622 just as "notmuch search" has historically behaved.
624 The new option values allow for thread IDs, message IDs, lists of
625 tags, and lists of filenames to be returned from searches. It is
626 expected that this new option will be very useful in shell
627 scripts. For example:
629 for file in $(notmuch search --output=files <search-terms>); do
630 <operations-on> "$file"
633 notmuch show --format=mbox <search-specification>
635 This new option allows for the messages matching a search
636 specification to be presented as an mbox. Specifically the "mboxrd"
637 format is used which allows for reversible quoting of lines
638 beginning with "From ". A reader should remove a single '>' from the
639 beginning of all lines beginning with one or more '>' characters
640 followed by the 5 characters "From ".
642 notmuch config [get|set] <section>.<item> [value ...]
644 The new top-level "config" command allows for any value in the
645 notmuch configuration file to be queried or set to a new value. Both
646 single-valued and multi-valued items are supported, as our any
647 custom items stored in the configuration file.
649 Avoid setting Bcc header in "notmuch reply"
651 We decided that this was a bit heavy-handed as the actual mail
652 user-agent should be responsible for setting any Bcc option. Also,
653 see below for the notmuch/emacs user-agent now setting an Fcc by
654 default rather than Bcc.
658 Add notmuch_query_get_query_string and notmuch_query_get_sort
660 These are simply functions for querying properties of a
661 notmuch_query_t object.
665 Enable Fcc of all sent messages by default (to "sent" directory)
667 All messages sent from the emacs interface will now be saved to the
668 notmuch mail store where they will be incorporated to the database
669 by the next "notmuch new". By default, messages are saved to the
670 "sent" directory at the top-level of the mail store. This directory
671 can be customized by means of the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" option in the
672 notmuch customize interface.
674 Ability to all open messages in a thread to a pipe
676 Historically, the '|' keybinding allows for piping a single message
677 to an external command. Now, by prefixing this key with a prefix
678 argument, (for example, by pressing "Control-U |"), all open
679 messages in the current thread will be sent to the external command.
681 Optional support for detecting inline patches
683 This hook is disabled by default but can be enabled with a checkbox
684 under "Notmuch Show Insert Text/Plain Hook" in the notmuch customize
685 interface. It allows for inline patches to be detected and treated
686 as if they were attachments, (with context-sensitive highlighting).
688 Automatically tag messages as "replied" when sending a reply
690 Messages replied to within the emacs interface will now be tagged as
691 "replied". This feature can easily be customized to add or remove
692 other tags as well. For example, a user might use a tag of
693 "needs-reply" and can configure this feature to automatically remove
694 that tag when replying. See "Notmuch Message Mark Replied" in the
695 notmuch customize interface.
697 Allow search-result color specifications to overlay each other
699 For example, one tag can specify the background color of matching
700 lines, while another can specify the foreground. With this change,
701 both settings will now be visible simultaneously, (which was not the
702 case in previous releases). See "Notmuch Search Line Faces" in the
703 notmuch customize interface.
705 Make hidden author names still available for incremental search.
707 When there is insufficient space to display all authors of a thread
708 in search results, the names of hidden authors are now still made
709 available to emacs' incremental search commands. As the user
710 searches, matching lines will temporarily expand to show the hidden
713 New binding of Control-TAB (works like TAB in reverse)
715 Many notmuch nodes already use TAB to navigate forward through
716 various items allowing actions, (message headers, email attachments,
717 etc.). The new Control-TAB binding operates similarly but in the
720 New build-system features
721 -------------------------
722 Various portability fixes have been applied
724 These include fixes for build failures on at least Solaris, FreeBSD,
725 and Fedora systems. We're hopeful that the notmuch code base is now
726 more portable than ever before.
728 Arrange for libnotmuch to be found automatically after make install
730 The notmuch build system is now careful to help the user avoid
731 errors of the form "libnotmuch.so could not be found" immediately
732 after installing. This support takes two forms:
734 1. If the library is installed to a system directory,
735 (configured in /etc/ld.so.conf), then "make install" will
736 automatically run ldconfig.
738 2. If the library is installed to a non-system directory, the
739 build system adds a DR_RUNPATH entry to the final binary
740 pointing to the directory to which the library is installed.
742 When this support works, the user should be able to run notmuch
743 immediately after "make install", without any errors trying to find
744 the notmuch library, and without having to manually set environment
745 variables such as LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
747 Check compiler/linker options before using them
749 The configure script now carefully checks that any desired
750 compilation options, (whether for enabling compiler warnings, or for
751 embedding rpath, etc.), are supported. Only supported options are
752 used in the resulting Makefile.
754 New test-suite features
755 -----------------------
756 New modularization of test suite.
758 Thanks to a gracious relicensing of the test-suite infrastructure
759 from the git project, notmuch now has a modular test suite. This
760 provides the ability to run individual sections of the test suite
761 rather than the whole things. It also provides better summary of
762 test results, with support for tests that are expected to fail
763 (BROKEN and FIXED) in addition to PASS and FAIL. Finally, it makes
764 it easy to run the test suite within valgrind (pass --valgrind to
765 notmuch-test or to any sub-script) which has been very useful.
767 New testing of emacs interface.
769 The test suite has been augmented to allow automated testing of the
770 emacs interfaces. So far, this includes basic searches, display of
771 threads, and tag manipulation. This also includes a test that a new
772 message can successfully be sent out through a (dummy) SMTP server
773 and that said message is successfully integrated into the notmuch
774 database via the FCC setting.
778 Fix potential corruption of database when "notmuch new " is interrupted.
780 Previously, an interruption of "notmuch new" would (rarely) result
781 in a corrupt database. The corruption would manifest itself by a
782 persistent error of the form:
784 document ID of 1234 has no thread ID
786 The message-adding code has been carefully audited and reworked to
787 avoid this sort of corruption regardless of when it is interrupted.
789 Fix failure with extremely long message ID headers.
791 Previously, a message with an extremely long message ID, (say, more
792 than 300 characters), would fail to be added to notmuch, (triggering
793 Xapian exceptions). This has now been fixed.
795 Fix for messages with "charset=unknown-8bit"
797 Previously, messages with this charset would cause notmuch to emit a
798 GMime warning, (which would then trip up emacs or other interfaces
799 parsing the notmuch results).
801 Fix notmuch_query_search_threads function to return NULL on any exception
803 Fix "notmuch search" to return non-zero if notmuch_query_search_threads fails
805 Previously, this command could confusingly report a Xapian
806 exception, yet still return an error code of 0. It now correctly
807 returns a failing error code of 1 in this case.
811 Fix to handle a message with a subject containing, for example "[1234]"
813 Previously, a message subject containing a sequence of digits within
814 square brackets would cause the emacs interface to mis-parse the
815 output of "notmuch search". This would result in the message being
816 mis-displayed and prevent the user from manipulating the message in
819 Fix to correctly handle message IDs containing ".."
821 The emacs interface now properly quotes message IDs to avoid a
822 Xapian bug in which the ".." within a message ID would be
823 misinterpreted as a numeric range specification.
827 The python bindings for notmuch have been updated to work with python3.
829 Debian-specific fixes
830 ---------------------
831 Fix emacs initialization so "M-x notmuch" works for users by default.
833 Now, a new Debian user can immediately run "emacs -f notmuch" after
834 "apt-get install notmuch". Previously, the user would have had to
835 edit the ~/.emacs file to add "(require 'notmuch)" before this would
838 Notmuch 0.3.1 (2010-04-27)
839 ==========================
842 Fix an infinite loop in "notmuch reply"
844 This bug could be triggered by replying to a message where the
845 user's primary email address did not appear in the To: header and
846 the user had not configured any secondary email addresses. The bug
847 was a simple re-use of the same iterator variable in nested loops.
849 Fix a potential SEGV in "notmuch search"
851 This bug could be triggered by an author name ending in a ','.
852 Admittedly - that's almost certainly a spam email, but we never
853 want notmuch to crash.
857 Fix calculations for line wrapping in the primary "notmuch" view.
859 Fix Fcc support to prompt to create a directory if the specified Fcc
860 directory does not exist.
864 Fix build on OpenSolaris (at least) due to missing 'extern "C"' block.
866 Without this, the C++ sources could not find strcasestr and the
867 final linking of notmuch would fail.
869 Notmuch 0.3 (2010-04-27)
870 ========================
871 New command-line features
872 -------------------------
873 User-configurable tags for new messages
875 A new "new.tags" option is available in the configuration file to
876 determine which tags are applied to new messages. Run "notmuch
877 setup" to generate new documentation within ~/.notmuch-config on how
878 to specify this value.
880 Threads search results named based on subjects that match search
882 This means that when new mails arrived to a thread you've previously
883 read, and the new mails have a new subject, you will see that
884 subject in the search results rather than the old subject.
886 Faster operation of "notmuch tag" (avoid unneeded sorting)
888 Since the user just wants to tag all matching messages, we can make
889 things perform a bit faster by avoiding the sort.
891 Even Better guessing of From: header for "notmuch reply"
893 Notmuch now looks at a number of headers when trying to figure out
894 the best From: header to use in a reply. This is helpful if you have
895 several configured email addresses, and you also subscribe to various
896 mailing lists with different addresses, (so that mails you are
897 replying to won't always include your subscribed address in the To:
900 Indication of author names that match a search
902 When notmuch displays threads as the result of a search, it now
903 lists the authors that match the search before listing the other
904 authors in the thread. It inserts a pipe '|' symbol between the last
905 matching and first non-matching author. This is especially useful in
906 a search that includes tag:unread. Now the authors of the unread
907 messages in the thread are listed first.
911 Sebastian Spaeth has contributed his python bindings for the notmuch
912 library to the central repository. These bindings were previously
913 known as "cnotmuch" within python but have now been renamed to be
914 accessible with a simple, and more official-looking "import notmuch".
916 The bindings have already proven very useful as people proficient in
917 python have been able to easily develop programs to do notmuch-based
918 searches for email-address completion, maildir-flag synchronization,
921 These bindings are available within the bindings/python directory, but
922 are not yet integrated into the top-level Makefiles, nor the top-level
923 package-building scripts. Improvements are welcome.
925 Emacs interface improvements
926 ----------------------------
927 An entirely new initial view for notmuch, (friendly yet powerful)
929 Some of us call the new view "notmuch hello" but you can get at it
930 by simply calling "emacs -f notmuch". The new view provides a search
931 bar where new searches can be performed. It also displays a list of
932 recent searches, along with a button to save any of these, giving it
933 a new name as a "saved search". Many people find these "saved
934 searches" one of the most convenient ways of organizing their mail,
935 (providing all of the features of "folders" in other mail clients,
936 but without any of the disadvantages).
938 Finally, this view can also optionally display all of the tags that
939 exist in the database, along with a count for each tag, and a custom
940 search of messages with that tag that's simply a click (or keypress)
943 Note: For users that liked the original mode of "emacs -f notmuch"
944 immediately displaying a particular search result, we
945 recommend instead running something like:
947 emacs --eval '(notmuch search "tag:inbox" t)'
949 The "t" means to sort the messages in an "oldest first" order,
950 (as notmuch would do previously by default). You can also
951 leave that off to have your search results in "newest first"
954 Full-featured "customize" support for configuring notmuch
956 Notmuch now plugs in well to the emacs "customize" mode to make it
957 much simpler to find things about the notmuch interface that can be
960 You can get to this mode by starting at the main "Customize" menu in
961 emacs, then browsing through "Applications", "Mail", and
962 "Notmuch". Or you can go straight to "M-x customize-group"
965 Once you're at the customize screen, you'll see a list of documented
966 options that can be manipulated along with checkboxes, drop-down
967 selectors, and text-entry boxes for configuring the various
970 Support for doing tab-completion of email addresses
972 This support currently relies on an external program,
973 (notmuch-addresses), that is not yet shipped with notmuch
974 itself. But multiple, suitable implementations of this program have
975 already been written that generate address completions by doing
976 notmuch searches of your email collection. For example, providing
977 first those addresses that you have composed messages to in the
980 One such program (implemented in python with the python bindings to
981 notmuch) is available via:
983 git clone http://jkr.acm.jhu.edu/git/notmuch_addresses.git
985 Install that program as notmuch-addresses on your PATH, and then
986 hitting TAB on a partial email address or name within the To: or Cc:
987 line of an email message will provide matching completions.
989 Support for file-based (Fcc) delivery of sent messages to mail store
991 This isn't yet enabled by default. To enable this, one will have to
992 set the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" setting within the notmuch customize
993 screen, (see its documentation there for details). We anticipate
994 making this automatic in a future release.
996 New 'G' key binding to trigger mail refresh (G == "Get new mail")
998 The 'G' key works wherever '=' works. Before refreshing the screen
999 it calls an external program that can be used to poll email servers,
1000 run notmuch new and setup specific tags for the new emails. The
1001 script to be called should be configured with the "Notmuch Poll
1002 Script" setting in the customize interface. This script will
1003 typically invoke "notmuch new" and then perhaps several "notmuch
1006 Implement emacs message display with the JSON output from notmuch.
1008 This is much more robust than the previous implementation, (where
1009 some HTML mails and mail quoting the notmuch code with the delimiter
1010 characters in it would cause the parser to fall over).
1012 Better handling of HTML messages and MIME attachments (inline images!)
1014 Allow for any MIME parts that emacs can display to be displayed
1015 inline. This includes inline viewing of image attachments, (provided
1016 the window is large enough to fit the image at its natural size).
1018 Much more robust handling of HTML messages. Currently both text/plain
1019 and text/html alternates will be rendered next to each other. In a
1020 future release, users will be able to decide to see only one or the
1021 other representation.
1023 Each attachment now has its own button so that attachments can be
1024 saved individually (the 'w' key is still available to save all
1027 Customizable support for tidying of text/plain message content
1029 Many new functions are available for tidying up message
1030 content. These include options such as wrapping long lines,
1031 compressing duplicate blank lines, etc.
1033 Most of these are disabled by default, but can easily be enabled by
1034 clicking the available check boxes under the "Notmuch Show Insert
1035 Text/Plain Hook" within the notmuch customize screen.
1037 New support for searchable citations (even when hidden)
1039 When portions of overly-long citations are hidden, the contents of
1040 these citations will still be available for emacs' standard
1041 "incremental search" functions. When the search matches any portion
1042 of a hidden citation, the citation will become visible temporarily
1043 to display the search result.
1045 More flexible handling of header visibility
1047 As an answer to complaints from many users, the To, Cc, and Date
1048 headers of messages are no longer hidden by default. For those users
1049 that liked that these were hidden, a new "Notmuch Messages Headers
1050 Visible" option in the customize interface can be set to nil. The
1051 visibility of headers can still be toggled on a per-message basis
1052 with the 'h' keybinding.
1054 For users that don't want to see some subset of those headers, the
1055 new "Notmuch Message Headers" variable can be customized to list
1056 only those headers that should be present in the display of a message.
1058 The Return key now toggles message visibility anywhere
1060 Previously this worked only on the first summary-line of a message.
1062 Customizable formatting of search results
1064 The user can easily customize the order, width, and formatting of
1065 the various fields in a "notmuch search" buffer. See the "Notmuch
1066 Search Result Format" section of the customize interface.
1068 Generate nicer names for search buffers when using a saved search.
1070 Add a notmuch User-Agent header when sending mail from notmuch/emacs.
1072 New keybinding (M-Ret) to open all collapsed messages in a thread.
1076 Provide a new NOTMUCH_SORT_UNSORTED value for queries
1078 This can be somewhat faster when sorting simply isn't desired. For
1079 example when collecting a set of messages that will all be
1080 manipulated identically, (adding a tag, removing a tag, deleting the
1081 messages), then there's no advantage to sorting the messages by
1086 Fix to compile against GMime 2.6
1088 Previously notmuch insisted on being able to find GMime 2.4, (even
1089 though GMime 2.6 would have worked all along).
1091 Fix configure script to accept (and ignore) various standard options.
1093 For example, those that the Gentoo build scripts expect configure to
1094 accept are now all accepted.
1098 A large number of new tests for the many new features.
1100 Better display of output from failed tests.
1102 Now shows failures with diff rather than forcing the user to gaze at
1103 complete actual and expected output looking for deviation.
1105 Notmuch 0.2 (2010-04-16)
1106 ========================
1107 This is the second release of the notmuch mail system, with actual
1108 detailed release notes this time!
1110 This release consists of a number of minor new features that make
1111 notmuch more pleasant to use, and a few fairly major bug fixes.
1113 We didn't quite hit our release target of "about a week" from the 0.1
1114 release, (0.2 is happening 11 days after 0.1), but we hope to do
1115 better for next week. Look forward to some major features coming to
1116 notmuch in subsequent releases.
1122 Better guessing of From: header.
1124 Notmuch now tries harder to guess which configured address should be
1125 used as the From: line in a "notmuch reply". It will examine the
1126 Received: headers if it fails to find any configured address in To:
1127 or Cc:. This allows it to often choose the correct address even when
1128 replying to a message sent to a mailing list, and not directly to a
1131 Make "notmuch count" with no arguments count all messages
1133 Previously, it was hard to construct a search term that was
1134 guaranteed to match all messages.
1136 Provide a new special-case search term of "*" to match all messages.
1138 This can be used in any command accepting a search term, such as
1139 "notmuch search '*'". Note that you'll want to take care that the
1140 shell doesn't expand * against the current files. And note that the
1141 support for "*" is a special case. It's only meaningful as a single
1142 search term and loses its special meaning when combined with any
1145 Automatically detect thread connections even when a parent message is
1148 Previously, if two or more message were received with a common
1149 parent, but that parent was not received, then these messages would
1150 not be recognized as belonging to the same thread. This is now fixed
1151 so that such messages are properly connected in a thread.
1155 Fix potential data loss in "notmuch new" with SIGINT
1157 One code path in "notmuch new" was not properly handling
1158 SIGINT. Previously, this could lead to messages being removed from
1159 the database (and their tags being lost) if the user pressed
1160 Control-C while "notmuch new" was working.
1162 Fix segfault when a message includes a MIME part that is empty.
1164 Fix handling of non-ASCII characters with --format=json
1166 Previously, characters outside the range of 7-bit ASCII were
1167 silently dropped from the JSON output. This led to corrupted display
1168 of utf-8 content in the upcoming notmuch web-based frontends.
1170 Fix headers to be properly decoded in "notmuch reply"
1172 Previously, the user might see:
1174 Subject: Re: =?iso-8859-2?q?Rozlu=E8ka?=
1178 Subject: Re: Rozlučka
1180 The former text is properly encoded to be RFC-compliant SMTP, will
1181 be sent correctly, and will be properly decoded by the
1182 recipient. But the user trying to edit the reply would likely be
1183 unable to read or edit that field in its encoded form.
1185 Emacs client features
1186 ---------------------
1187 Show the last few lines of citations as well as the first few lines.
1189 It's often the case that the last sentence of a citation is what is
1190 being replied to directly, so the last few lines are often much more
1191 important. The number of lines shown at the beginning and end of any
1192 citation can be configured, (notmuch-show-citation-lines-prefix and
1193 notmuch-show-citation-lines-suffix).
1195 The '+' and '-' commands in the search view can now add and remove
1198 Selective bulk tagging is now possible by selecting a region of
1199 threads and then using either the '+' or '-' keybindings. Bulk
1200 tagging is still available for all threads matching the current
1201 search with the '*' binding.
1203 More meaningful buffer names for thread-view buffers.
1205 Notmuch now uses the Subject of the thread as the buffer
1206 name. Previously it was using the thread ID, which is a meaningless
1209 Provide for customized colors of threads in search view based on tags.
1211 See the documentation of notmuch-search-line-faces, (or us "M-x
1212 customize" and browse to the "notmuch" group within "Applications"
1213 and "Mail"), for details on how to configure this colorization.
1215 Build-system features
1216 ---------------------
1217 Add support to properly build libnotmuch on Darwin systems (OS X).
1219 Add support to configure for many standard options.
1221 We include actual support for:
1223 --includedir --mandir --sysconfdir
1225 And accept and silently ignore several more:
1227 --build --infodir --libexecdir --localstatedir
1228 --disable-maintainer-mode --disable-dependency-tracking
1230 Install emacs client in "make install" rather than requiring a
1231 separate "make install-emacs".
1233 Automatically compute versions numbers between releases.
1235 This support uses the git-describe notation, so a version such as
1236 0.1-144-g43cbbfc indicates a version that is 144 commits since the
1237 0.1 release and is available as git commit "43cbbfc".
1239 Add a new "make test" target to run the test suite and actually verify
1242 Notmuch 0.1 (2010-04-05)
1243 ========================
1244 This is the first release of the notmuch mail system.
1246 It includes the libnotmuch library, the notmuch command-line
1247 interface, and an emacs-based interface to notmuch.
1249 Note: Notmuch will work best with Xapian 1.0.18 (or later) or Xapian
1250 1.1.4 (or later). Previous versions of Xapian (whether 1.0 or 1.1) had
1251 a performance bug that made notmuch very slow when modifying
1252 tags. This would cause distracting pauses when reading mail while
1253 notmuch would wait for Xapian when removing the "inbox" and "unread"
1254 tags from messages in a thread.