1 Notmuch 0.6 (2011-07-01)
2 =======================
7 Notmuch queries can now include a search term to match the
8 directories in which mail files are stored (within the mail
9 storage). The syntax is as follows:
13 For example, one might use things such as:
19 to match any path containing a directory "spam", "work/todo", or
20 containing a directory starting with "2011-", respectively.
22 This feature is particularly useful for users of delivery-agent
23 software (such as procmail or maildrop) that is filtering mail and
24 delivering it to particular folders, or users of systems such as
25 Gmail that use filesystem directories to indicate message tags.
27 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
28 notmuch will be searchable with folder: terms. In order to enable
29 this feature for all mail, the entire notmuch index will need to be
32 notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
33 # Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
35 notmuch restore notmuch.dump
39 Both the command line interface and the emacs-interface have new
40 support for PGP/MIME, detailed below. Thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor
41 and Jameson Graef Rollins for making this happen.
43 New, automatic tags: "signed" and "encrypted"
45 These tags will automatically be applied to messages containing
46 multipart/signed and multipart/encrypted parts.
48 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
49 notmuch will receive these tags.
51 New command-line features
52 -------------------------
53 Add new "notmuch show --verify" option for signature verification
55 This option instruct notmuch to verify the signature of
56 PGP/MIME-signed parts.
58 Add new "notmuch show --decrypt" and "notmuch reply --decrypt" options
60 This option instructs notmuch to decrypt PGP/MIME-encrypted parts.
61 Note that this feature currently requires gpg-agent and a passphrase entry
62 tool (e.g. pinentry-gtk or pinentry-curses).
64 Proper nesting of multipart parts in "notmuch show" output
66 MIME parts are now display with proper nesting to reflect original
67 MIME hierarchy of a message. This allows clients to correctly
68 analyze the MIME structure, (such as, for example, determining to
69 which parts a signature part applies).
71 Add new "notmuch show --part" option
73 This is a replacement for the older "notmuch part" command, (which
74 is now deprecated—it should still work as always, but is no longer
75 documented). Putting part output under "notmuch show" allows for all
76 of the "notmuch show" options to be applied when extracting a single
77 part, (such as --format=json for extracting a message part with JSON
80 Deprecate "notmuch search-tags", (in favor of "notmuch search --output=tags *")
82 The "notmuch search-tags" sub-command has been redundant since the
83 addition of the --output=tags option to "notmuch search". We now
84 make that more clear by deprecating "notmuch search-tags", (dropping
85 it from the documentation). We do continue to support the old syntax
86 by translating it internally to the new call.
88 Performance improvements
89 ------------------------
90 Faster searches (by doing fewer searches to construct threads)
92 Whenever a user asks for search results as threads, notmuch first
93 performs a search for messages matching the query, then performs
94 additional searches to find other messages in the resulting threads.
96 Removing inefficiencies and redundancies in these secondary searches
97 results in a measured speedups of 1.5x for a typical search.
99 Faster searches (by doing fewer passes to gather message data)
101 Optimizing Xapian data access patterns (using a single pass to get
102 all message-document data rather than a pass for each data type)
103 results in a measured speedup of 1.7x for a typical search.
105 The benefits of this optimization combine with the preceding
106 optimization. With both in place, Austin Clements measured a speedup
107 of 2.5x for a search of all messages in his inbox (was 4.5s, now
108 1.8s). Thanks, Austin!
110 Faster initial indexing
112 More efficient indexing of new messages results in a measured
113 speedup of 1.4x for the initial indexing of 3 GB of mail (1h 14m
114 rather than 1h 46m). Thanks to Austin Clements and Michal Sojka.
116 Make "notmuch new" faster for unchanged directories
118 Optimizing to not do any further examinations of sub-directories
119 when the filesystem indicates that a directory is unchanged from the
120 last "notmuch new" results in measured speedups of 8.5 for the "No
121 new mail" case, (was 0.77s, now 0.09s). Thanks to Karel Zak.
123 New emacs-interface features
124 ----------------------------
126 Support for PGP/MIME (GnuPG)
128 Automatically indicate validity of signatures for multipart/signed
129 messages. Automatically display decrypted content for
130 multipart/encrypted messages. See the emacs variable
131 notmuch-crypto-process-mime for more information. Note that this
132 needs gpg-agent and a pinentry tool just as the command line tools.
133 Also note there is no support SMIME yet.
135 Output of pipe command is now displayed if pipe command fails
137 This is extremely useful in the common use case of piping a patch to
138 "git am". If git fails to cleanly merge the patch the error messages
139 from the failed merge are now clearly displayed to the user, (where
140 previously they were silently hidden from the user).
142 User-selectable From address
144 A user can choose which configured email addresses should be used as
145 the From address whenever composing a new message. To do so, simply
146 press C-u before the command which will open a new message. Emacs
147 will prompt for the from address to use.
149 The user can customize the "Notmuch Identities" setting in the
150 notmuch customize group in order to use addresses other than those in
151 the notmuch configuration file if desired.
153 The user can also choose to always be prompted for the from address
154 when composing a new message (without having to use C-u) by setting
155 the "Notmuch Always Prompt For Sender" option in the notmuch
158 Hiding of repeated subjects in collapsed thread view
160 In notmuch-show mode, if a collapsed message has the same subject as
161 its parent, the subject is not shown.
163 Automatic detection and hiding of original message in top-posted message
165 When a message contains a line looking something like:
167 ----- Original Message -----
169 emacs hides this and all subsequent lines as an "original message",
170 (allowing the user to click or press enter on the "original message"
171 button to display it again). This makes the handling of top-posted
172 citations work much like conventional citations.
174 New hooks for running code when tags are modified
176 Some users want to perform additional actions whenever a particular
177 tag is added/removed from a message. This could be used to, for
178 example, interface with some external spam-recognition training
179 tool. To facilitate this, two new hooks are added which can be
180 modified in the following settings of the notmuch customize group:
182 Notmuch Before Tag Hook
183 Notmuch After Tag Hook
185 New optional support for hiding some multipart/alternative parts
187 Many emails are sent with redundant content within a
188 multipart/alternative group (such as a text/plain part as well as a
189 text/html part). Users can configure the setting:
191 Notmuch Show All Multipart/Alternative Parts
193 to "off" in the notmuch customize group to have the interface
194 automatically hide some part alternatives (such as text/html
195 parts). This new part hiding is not configured by default yet
196 because there's not yet a simple way to re-display such a hidden
197 part if it is not actually redundant with a displayed part.
199 Better rendering of text/x-vcalendar parts
201 These parts are now displayed in a format suitable for use with the
204 Avoid getting confused by Subject and Author fields with newline characters
206 Replacing all characters with ASCII code less than 32 with a question mark.
208 Cleaner display of From line in email messages (remove double quotes,
209 and drop "name" if it's actually just a repeat of the email address).
211 Vim interface improvements
212 --------------------------
213 Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface:
215 * Using sendmail directly rather than mailx,
216 * Implementing archive in show view
217 * Add support to mark as read in show and search views
218 * Add delete commands
221 Bindings improvements
222 ---------------------
223 Ruby bindings are now much more complete
225 Including QUERY.sort, QUERY.to_s, MESSAGE.maildir_flags_to_tags,
226 MESSAGE.tags_to_maildir_flags, and MESSAGE.get_filenames
228 * Python bindings have been upodated and extended
229 (docs online at http://packages.python.org/notmuch/)
232 - Message().get_filenames(),
233 - Message().tags_to_maildir_flags(),Message().maildir_flags_to_tags()
234 - list(Threads()) and list(Messages) works now
236 - Message().__cmp__() and __hash__()
237 These allow, for example:
240 As well as set arithmetic on Messages():
242 s1, s2= set(msgs1), set(msgs2)
247 - len(Messages()) as it exausted the iterator.
248 Use len(list(Messages())) or
249 Query.count_messages() to get the length.
251 Added initial Go bindings in bindings/go
253 New build-system features
254 -------------------------
255 Added support for building in a directory other than the source directory
257 This can be used with the widely-supported idiom of simply running
258 the configure script from some other directory:
265 Fix to save configure options for future, implicit runs of configure
267 When a user updates the source (such as with "git pull") calling
268 "make" may cause an automatic re-run of the configure script. When
269 this happens, the configure script will automatically be called with
270 the same options the user originally passed in the most-recent
271 manual invocation of configure.
273 New test-suite feature
274 ----------------------
275 Binary for bash for running test suite now located via PATH.
277 The notmuch test suite requires a fairly recent version of bash (>=
278 bash 4). As some systems supply an older version of bash at
279 /bin/bash, the test suite is now updated to search $PATH to locate
280 the bash binary. This allows users of systems with old /bin/bash to
281 simply install bash >= 4 somewhere on $PATH before /bin and then use
284 Support for testing output with a trailing newline.
286 Previously, some tests would fail to notice a difference in the
287 presence/absence of a trailing newline in a program output, (which
288 has led to bugs in the past). Now, carefully-written tests (using
289 test_expect_equal_file rather than test_expect_equal) will detect
290 any change in the presence/absence of a trailing newline. Many tests
291 are updated to take advantage of this.
293 Avoiding accessing user's $HOME while running test suite
295 The test suite now carefully creates its own HOME directory. This
296 allows the test suite to be run with no existing HOME directory, (as
297 some build systems apparently do), and avoids test-suite differences
298 due to configuration files in the users HOME directory.
303 Output *all* files for "notmuch search --output=files"
305 For the cases where multiple files have the same Message ID,
306 previous versions of notmuch would output only one such file. This
307 command is now fixed to correctly output all files.
309 Fixed spurious search results from "overlapped" indexing of addresses
311 This fixed a bug where a search for:
313 to:user@elsewhere.com
315 would incorrectly match a message sent:
317 To: user@example,com, someone@elsewhere.com
319 Fix --output=json when search has no results
321 A bug present since notmuch 0.4 had caused searches with no results
322 to produce an invalid json object. This is now fixed to cleanly
323 return a valid json object representing an empty array "[]" as
326 fix the automatic detection of the From address for "notmuch reply"
327 from the Received headers in some cases.
329 Fix core dump on DragonFlyBSD due to -1 return value from
330 sysconf(_SC_GETPW_R_SIZE_MAX).
332 Cleaned up several memory leaks
334 Eliminated a few, rare segmentation faults and a double-free.
336 Fix libnotmuch library to only export notmuch API functions
338 Previous release of the notmuch library also exported some Xapian
339 C++ exception type symbols. These were never part of the library
340 interface and were never intended to be exported.
342 Emacs-interface bug fixes
343 -------------------------
344 Display any unexpected output or errors from "notmuch search" invocations
346 Previously any misformatted output or trailing error messages were
347 silently ignored. This output is now clearly displayed. This fix was
348 very helpful in identifying and fixing the bug described below.
350 Fix bug where some threads would be missing from large search results
352 When a search returned a "large" number of results, the emacs
353 interface was incorrectly dropping one thread every time the output
354 of the "notmuch search" process spanned the emacs read-buffer. This
357 Avoid re-compression of .gz files (and similar) when saving attachment
359 Emacs was being too clever for its own good and trying to
360 re-compress pre-compressed .gz files when saving such attachments
361 (potentially corrupting the attachment). The emacs interface is
362 fixed to avoid this bug.
364 Fix hiding of a message when a previously-hidden citation is visible
366 Previously the citation would remain visible in this case. This is
367 fixed so that hiding a message hides all parts.