1 Notmuch 0.3.1 (2010-04-27)
2 ==========================
5 Fix an infinite loop in "notmuch reply"
7 This bug could be triggered by replying to a message where the
8 user's primary email address did not appear in the To: header and
9 the user had not configured any secondary email addresses. The bug
10 was a simple re-use of the same iterator variable in nested loops.
12 Fix a potential SEGV in "notmuch search"
14 This bug could be triggered by an author name ending in a ','.
15 Admittedly - that's almost certainly a spam email, but we never
16 want notmuch to crash.
20 Fix calculations for line wrapping in the primary "notmuch" view.
22 Fix Fcc support to prompt to create a directory if the specified Fcc
23 directory does not exist.
27 Fix build on OpenSolaris (at least) due to missing 'extern "C"' block.
29 Without this, the C++ sources could not find strcasestr and the
30 final linking of notmuch would fail.
32 Notmuch 0.3 (2010-04-27)
33 ========================
34 New command-line features
35 -------------------------
36 User-configurable tags for new messages
38 A new "new.tags" option is available in the configuration file to
39 determine which tags are applied to new messages. Run "notmuch
40 setup" to generate new documentation within ~/.notmuch-config on how
41 to specify this value.
43 Threads search results named based on subjects that match search
45 This means that when new mails arrived to a thread you've previously
46 read, and the new mails have a new subject, you will see that
47 subject in the search results rather than the old subject.
49 Faster operation of "notmuch tag" (avoid unneeded sorting)
51 Since the user just wants to tag all matching messages, we can make
52 things perform a bit faster by avoiding the sort.
54 Even Better guessing of From: header for "notmuch reply"
56 Notmuch now looks at a number of headers when trying to figure out
57 the best From: header to use in a reply. This is helpful if you have
58 several configured email addresses, and you also subscribe to various
59 mailing lists with different addresses, (so that mails you are
60 replying to won't always include your subscribed address in the To:
63 Indication of author names that match a search
65 When notmuch displays threads as the result of a search, it now
66 lists the authors that match the search before listing the other
67 authors in the thread. It inserts a pipe '|' symbol between the last
68 matching and first non-matching author. This is especially useful in
69 a search that includes tag:unread. Now the authors of the unread
70 messages in the thread are listed first.
74 Sebastian Spaeth has contributed his python bindings for the notmuch
75 library to the central repository. These bindings were previously
76 known as "cnotmuch" within python but have now been renamed to be
77 accessible with a simple, and more official-looking "import notmuch".
79 The bindings have already proven very useful as people proficient in
80 python have been able to easily develop programs to do notmuch-based
81 searches for email-address completion, maildir-flag synchronization,
84 These bindings are available within the bindings/python directory, but
85 are not yet integrated into the top-level Makefiles, nor the top-level
86 package-building scripts. Improvements are welcome.
88 Emacs interface improvements
89 ----------------------------
90 An entirely new initial view for notmuch, (friendly yet powerful)
92 Some of us call the new view "notmuch hello" but you can get at it
93 by simply calling "emacs -f notmuch". The new view provides a search
94 bar where new searches can be performed. It also displays a list of
95 recent searches, along with a button to save any of these, giving it
96 a new name as a "saved search". Many people find these "saved
97 searches" one of the most convenient ways of organizing their mail,
98 (providing all of the features of "folders" in other mail clients,
99 but without any of the disadvantages).
101 Finally, this view can also optionally display all of the tags that
102 exist in the database, along with a count for each tag, and a custom
103 search of messages with that tag that's simply a click (or keypress)
106 Note: For users that liked the original mode of "emacs -f notmuch"
107 immediately displaying a particular search result, we
108 recommend instead running something like:
110 emacs --eval '(notmuch search "tag:inbox" t)'
112 The "t" means to sort the messages in an "oldest first" order,
113 (as notmuch would do previously by default). You can also
114 leave that off to have your search results in "newest first"
117 Full-featured "customize" support for configuring notmuch
119 Notmuch now plugs in well to the emacs "customize" mode to make it
120 much simpler to find things about the notmuch interface that can be
123 You can get to this mode by starting at the main "Customize" menu in
124 emacs, then browsing through "Applications", "Mail", and
125 "Notmuch". Or you can go straight to "M-x customize-group"
128 Once you're at the customize screen, you'll see a list of documented
129 options that can be manipulated along with checkboxes, drop-down
130 selectors, and text-entry boxes for configuring the various
133 Support for doing tab-completion of email addresses
135 This support currently relies on an external program,
136 (notmuch-addresses), that is not yet shipped with notmuch
137 itself. But multiple, suitable implementations of this program have
138 already been written that generate address completions by doing
139 notmuch searches of your email collection. For example, providing
140 first those addresses that you have composed messages to in the
143 One such program (implemented in python with the python bindings to
144 notmuch) is available via:
146 git clone http://jkr.acm.jhu.edu/git/notmuch_addresses.git
148 Install that program as notmuch-addresses on your PATH, and then
149 hitting TAB on a partial email address or name within the To: or Cc:
150 line of an email message will provide matching completions.
152 Support for file-based (Fcc) delivery of sent messages to mail store
154 This isn't yet enabled by default. To enable this, one will have to
155 set the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" setting within the notmuch customize
156 screen, (see its documentation there for details). We anticipate
157 making this automatic in a future release.
159 New 'G' key binding to trigger mail refresh (G == "Get new mail")
161 The 'G' key works wherever '=' works. Before refreshing the screen
162 it calls an external program that can be used to poll email servers,
163 run notmuch new and setup specific tags for the new emails. The
164 script to be called should be configured with the "Notmuch Poll
165 Script" setting in the customize interface. This script will
166 typically invoke "notmuch new" and then perhaps several "notmuch
169 Implement emacs message display with the JSON output from notmuch.
171 This is much more robust than the previous implementation, (where
172 some HTML mails and mail quoting the notmuch code with the delimiter
173 characters in it would cause the parser to fall over).
175 Better handling of HTML messages and MIME attachments (inline images!)
177 Allow for any MIME parts that emacs can display to be displayed
178 inline. This includes inline viewing of image attachments, (provided
179 the window is large enough to fit the image at its natural size).
181 Much more robust handling of HTML messages. Currently both text/plain
182 and text/html alternates will be rendered next to each other. In a
183 future release, users will be able to decide to see only one or the
184 other representation.
186 Each attachment now has its own button so that attachments can be
187 saved individually (the 'w' key is still available to save all
190 Customizable support for tidying of text/plain message content
192 Many new functions are available for tidying up message
193 content. These include options such as wrapping long lines,
194 compressing duplicate blank lines, etc.
196 Most of these are disabled by default, but can easily be enabled by
197 clicking the available check boxes under the "Notmuch Show Insert
198 Text/Plain Hook" within the notmuch customize screen.
200 New support for searchable citations (even when hidden)
202 When portions of overly-long citations are hidden, the contents of
203 these citations will still be available for emacs' standard
204 "incremental search" functions. When the search matches any portion
205 of a hidden citation, the citation will become visible temporarily
206 to display the search result.
208 More flexible handling of header visibility
210 As an answer to complaints from many users, the To, Cc, and Date
211 headers of messages are no longer hidden by default. For those users
212 that liked that these were hidden, a new "Notmuch Messages Headers
213 Visible" option in the customize interface can be set to nil. The
214 visibility of headers can still be toggled on a per-message basis
215 with the 'h' keybinding.
217 For users that don't want to see some subset of those headers, the
218 new "Notmuch Message Headers" variable can be customized to list
219 only those headers that should be present in the display of a message.
221 The Return key now toggles message visibility anywhere
223 Previously this worked only on the first summary-line of a message.
225 Customizable formatting of search results
227 The user can easily customize the order, width, and formatting of
228 the various fields in a "notmuch search" buffer. See the "Notmuch
229 Search Result Format" section of the customize interface.
231 Generate nicer names for search buffers when using a saved search.
233 Add a notmuch User-Agent header when sending mail from notmuch/emacs.
235 New keybinding (M-Ret) to open all collapsed messages in a thread.
239 Provide a new NOTMUCH_SORT_UNSORTED value for queries
241 This can be somewhat faster when sorting simply isn't desired. For
242 example when collecting a set of messages that will all be
243 manipulated identically, (adding a tag, removing a tag, deleting the
244 messages), then there's no advantage to sorting the messages by
249 Fix to compile against GMime 2.6
251 Previously notmuch insisted on being able to find GMime 2.4, (even
252 though GMime 2.6 would have worked all along).
254 Fix configure script to accept (and ignore) various standard options.
256 For example, those that the gentoo build scripts expect configure to
257 accept are now all accepted.
261 A large number of new tests for the many new features.
263 Better display of output from failed tests.
265 Now shows failures with diff rather than forcing the user to gaze at
266 complete actual and expected output looking for deviation.
268 Notmuch 0.2 (2010-04-16)
269 ========================
270 This is the second release of the notmuch mail system, with actual
271 detailed release notes this time!
273 This release consists of a number of minor new features that make
274 notmuch more pleasant to use, and a few fairly major bug fixes.
276 We didn't quite hit our release target of "about a week" from the 0.1
277 release, (0.2 is happening 11 days after 0.1), but we hope to do
278 better for next week. Look forward to some major features coming to
279 notmuch in subsequent releases.
285 Better guessing of From: header.
287 Notmuch now tries harder to guess which configured address should be
288 used as the From: line in a "notmuch reply". It will examine the
289 Received: headers if it fails to find any configured address in To:
290 or Cc:. This allows it to often choose the correct address even when
291 replying to a message sent to a mailing list, and not directly to a
294 Make "notmuch count" with no arguments count all messages
296 Previously, it was hard to construct a search term that was
297 guaranteed to match all messages.
299 Provide a new special-case search term of "*" to match all messages.
301 This can be used in any command accepting a search term, such as
302 "notmuch search '*'". Note that you'll want to take care that the
303 shell doesn't expand * against the current files. And note that the
304 support for "*" is a special case. It's only meaningful as a single
305 search term and loses its special meaning when combined with any
308 Automatically detect thread connections even when a parent message is
311 Previously, if two or more message were received with a common
312 parent, but that parent was not received, then these messages would
313 not be recognized as belonging to the same thread. This is now fixed
314 so that such messages are properly connected in a thread.
318 Fix potential data loss in "notmuch new" with SIGINT
320 One code path in "notmuch new" was not properly handling
321 SIGINT. Previously, this could lead to messages being removed from
322 the database (and their tags being lost) if the user pressed
323 Control-C while "notmuch new" was working.
325 Fix segfault when a message includes a MIME part that is empty.
327 Fix handling of non-ASCII characters with --format=json
329 Previously, characters outside the range of 7-bit ASCII were
330 silently dropped from the JSON output. This led to corrupted display
331 of utf-8 content in the upcoming notmuch web-based frontends.
333 Fix headers to be properly decoded in "notmuch reply"
335 Previously, the user might see:
337 Subject: Re: =?iso-8859-2?q?Rozlu=E8ka?=
341 Subject: Re: Rozlučka
343 The former text is properly encoded to be RFC-compliant SMTP, will
344 be sent correctly, and will be properly decoded by the
345 recipient. But the user trying to edit the reply would likely be
346 unable to read or edit that field in its encoded form.
348 Emacs client features
349 ---------------------
350 Show the last few lines of citations as well as the first few lines.
352 It's often the case that the last sentence of a citation is what is
353 being replied to directly, so the last few lines are often much more
354 important. The number of lines shown at the beginning and end of any
355 citation can be configured, (notmuch-show-citation-lines-prefix and
356 notmuch-show-citation-lines-suffix).
358 The '+' and '-' commands in the search view can now add and remove
361 Selective bulk tagging is now possible by selecting a region of
362 threads and then using either the '+' or '-' keybindings. Bulk
363 tagging is still available for all threads matching the current
364 search with th '*' binding.
366 More meaningful buffer names for thread-view buffers.
368 Notmuch now uses the Subject of the thread as the buffer
369 name. Previously it was using the thread ID, which is a meaningless
372 Provide for customized colors of threads in search view based on tags.
374 See the documentation of notmuch-search-line-faces, (or us "M-x
375 customize" and browse to the "notmuch" group within "Applications"
376 and "Mail"), for details on how to configure this colorization.
378 Build-system features
379 ---------------------
380 Add support to properly build libnotmuch on Darwin systems (OS X).
382 Add support to configure for many standard options.
384 We include actual support for:
386 --includedir --mandir --sysconfdir
388 And accept and silently ignore several more:
390 --build --infodir --libexecdir --localstatedir
391 --disable-maintainer-mode --disable-dependency-tracking
393 Install emacs client in "make install" rather than requiring a
394 separate "make install-emacs".
396 Automatically compute versions numbers between releases.
398 This support uses the git-describe notation, so a version such as
399 0.1-144-g43cbbfc indicates a version that is 144 commits since the
400 0.1 release and is available as git commit "43cbbfc".
402 Add a new "make test" target to run the test suite and actually verify
405 Notmuch 0.1 (2010-04-05)
406 ========================
407 This is the first release of the notmuch mail system.
409 It includes the libnotmuch library, the notmuch command-line
410 interface, and an emacs-based interface to notmuch.
412 Note: Notmuch will work best with Xapian 1.0.18 (or later) or Xapian
413 1.1.4 (or later). Previous versions of Xapian (whether 1.0 or 1.1) had
414 a performance bug that made notmuch very slow when modifying
415 tags. This would cause distracting pauses when reading mail while
416 notmuch would wait for Xapian when removing the "inbox" and "unread"
417 tags from messages in a thread.