Notmuch 0.15.2 (2013-02-17)

Build fixes

Update dependencies to avoid problems when building in parallel.

Internal test framework changes

Adjust Emacs test watchdog mechanism to cope with process-attributes being unimplimented.

Notmuch 0.15.1 (2013-01-24)

Internal test framework changes

Set a default value for TERM when running tests. This fixes certain build failures in non-interactive environments.

Notmuch 0.15 (2013-01-18)

General

Date range search support

The date: prefix can now be used in queries to restrict the results to only messages within a particular time range (based on the Date: header) with a range syntax of date:<since>..<until>. Notmuch supports a wide variety of expressions in <since> and <until>. Please refer to the notmuch-search-terms(7) manual page for details.

Empty tag names and tags beginning with "-" are deprecated

Such tags have been a frequent source of confusion and cause (sometimes unresolvable) conflicts with other syntax. notmuch tag no longer allows such tags to be added to messages. Removing such tags continues to be supported to allow cleanup of existing tags, but may be removed in a future release.

Command-Line Interface

notmuch new no longer chokes on mboxes

notmuch new now rejects mbox files containing more than one message, rather than treating the file as one giant message.

Support for single message mboxes is deprecated

For historical reasons, notmuch new will index mbox files containing a single message; however, this behavior is now officially deprecated.

Fixed notmuch new to skip ignored broken symlinks

notmuch new now correctly skips symlinks if they are in the ignored files list. Previously, it would abort when encountering broken symlink, even if it was ignored.

New dump/restore format and tagging interface

There is a new batch-tag format for dump and restore that is more robust, particularly with respect to tags and message-ids containing whitespace.

notmuch tag now supports the ability to read tag operations and queries from an input stream, in a format compatible with the new dump/restore format.

Bcc and Reply-To headers are now available in notmuch show json output

The notmuch show --format=json now includes "Bcc" and "Reply-To" headers. For example notmuch Emacs client can now have these headers visible when the headers are added to the notmuch-message-headers variable.

CLI callers can now request a specific output format version

notmuch subcommands that support structured output now support a --format-version argument for requesting a specific version of the structured output, enabling better compatibility and error handling.

notmuch search has gained a null character separated text output format

The new --format=text0 output format for notmuch search prints output separated by null characters rather than newline characters. This is similar to the find(1) -print0 option, and works together with the xargs(1) -0 option.

Emacs Interface

Removal of the deprecated notmuch-folders variable

notmuch-folders has been deprecated since the introduction of saved searches and the notmuch hello view in notmuch 0.3. notmuch-folders has now been removed. Any remaining users should migrate to notmuch-saved-searches.

Visibility of MIME parts can be toggled

Each part of a multi-part MIME email can now be shown or hidden using the button at the top of each part (by pressing RET on it or by clicking). For emails with multiple alternative formats (e.g., plain text and HTML), only the preferred format is shown initially, but other formats can be shown using their part buttons. To control the behavior of this, see notmuch-multipart/alternative-discouraged and notmuch-show-all-multipart/alternative-parts.

Note notmuch-show-print-message (bound to '#' by default) will print all parts of multipart/alternative message regardless of whether they are currently hidden or shown in the buffer.

Emacs now buttonizes mid: links

mid: links are a standardized way to link to messages by message ID (see RFC 2392). Emacs now hyperlinks mid: links to the appropriate notmuch search.

Handle errors from bodypart insertions

If displaying the text of a message in show mode causes an error (in the notmuch-show-insert-part-* functions), notmuch no longer cuts off thread display at the offending message. The error is now simply displayed in place of the message.

Emacs now detects version mismatches with the notmuch CLI

Emacs now detects and reports when the Emacs interface version and the notmuch CLI version are incompatible.

Improved text/calendar content handling

Carriage returns in embedded text/calendar content caused insertion of the calendar content fail. Now CRs are removed before calling icalendar to extract icalendar data. In case icalendar extraction fails an error is thrown for the bodypart insertion function to deal with.

Disabled coding conversions when reading in with-current-notmuch-show-message

Depending on the user's locale, saving attachments containing 8-bit data may have performed an unintentional encoding conversion, corrupting the saved attachment. This has been fixed by making with-current-notmuch-show-message disable coding conversion.

Fixed errors with HTML email containing images in Emacs 24

Emacs 24 ships with a new HTML renderer that produces better output, but is slightly buggy. We work around a bug that caused it to fail for HTML email containing images.

Fixed handling of tags with unusual characters in them

Emacs now handles tags containing spaces, quotes, and parenthesis.

Fixed buttonization of id: links without quote characters

Emacs now correctly buttonizes id: links where the message ID is not quoted.

notmuch-hello refresh point placement improvements

Refreshing the notmuch-hello buffer does a better job of keeping the point where it was.

Automatic tag changes are now unified and customizable

All the automatic tag changes that the Emacs interface makes when reading, archiving, or replying to messages, can now be customized. Any number of tag additions and removals is supported through the notmuch-show-mark-read, notmuch-archive-tags, and notmuch-message-replied-tags customization variables.

Support for stashing the thread id in show view

Invoking notmuch-show-stash-message-id with a prefix argument stashes the (local and database specific) thread id of the current thread instead of the message id.

New add-on tool: notmuch-pick

The new contrib/ tool notmuch-pick is an experimental threaded message view for the emacs interface. Each message is one line in the results and the thread structure is shown using UTF-8 box drawing characters (similar to Mutt's threaded view). It comes between search and show in terms of amount of output and can be useful for viewing both single threads and multiple threads. See the notmuch-pick README file for further details and installation.

Portability

notmuch now builds on OpenBSD.

Internal test framework changes

The emacsclient binary is now user-configurable

The test framework now accepts TEST_EMACSCLIENT in addition to TEST_EMACS for configuring the emacsclient to use. This is necessary to avoid using an old emacsclient with a new emacs, which can result in buggy behavior.

Notmuch 0.14 (2012-08-20)

General bug fixes

Maildir tag synchronization

Maildir flag-to-tag synchronization now applies only to messages in maildir-like directory structures. Previously, it applied to any message that had a maildir "info" part, which meant it could incorrectly synchronize tags for non-maildir messages, while at the same time failing to synchronize tags for newly received maildir messages (typically causing new messages to not receive the "unread" tag).

Command-Line Interface

The deprecated positional output file argument to notmuch dump has been replaced with an --output option. The input file positional argument to notmuch restore has been replaced with an --input option for consistency with dump. These changes simplify the syntax of dump/restore options and make them more consistent with other notmuch commands.

Emacs Interface

Search results now get re-colored when tags are updated

The formatting of tags in search results can now be customized

Previously, attempting to change the format of tags in notmuch-search-result-format would usually break tagging from search-mode. We no longer make assumptions about the format.

Experimental support for multi-line search result formats

It is now possible to embed newlines in notmuch-search-result-format to make individual search results span multiple lines.

Next/previous in search and show now move by boundaries

All "next" and "previous" commands in the search and show modes now move to the next/previous result or message boundary. This doesn't change the behavior of "next", but "previous" commands will first move to the beginning of the current result or message if point is inside the result or message.

Search now uses the JSON format internally

This should address problems with unusual characters in authors and subject lines that could confuse the old text-based search parser.

The date shown in search results is no longer padded before applying user-specified formatting

Previously, the date in the search results was padded to fixed width before being formatted with notmuch-search-result-format. It is no longer padded. The default format has been updated, but if you've customized this variable, you may have to change your date format from "%s " to "%12s ".

The thread-id for the target-thread argument for notmuch-search should now be supplied without the "thread:" prefix.

Notmuch 0.13.2 (2012-06-02)

Bug-fix release

Update contrib/notmuch-deliver for API changes in 0.13. This fixes a compilation error for this contrib package.

Notmuch 0.13.1 (2012-05-29)

Bug-fix release

Fix inserting of UTF-8 characters from text/plain parts in reply

While notmuch gained ability to insert content from other than text/plain parts of email whenever text/plain parts are not available (notably HTML-only emails), replying to mails that do have text/plain the non-ASCII characters were incorrectly decoded. This is now fixed.

notmuch_database_get_directory and notmuch_database_find_message_by_filename now work on read-only databases

Previously, these functions attempted to create directory documents that didn't exist and would return an error or abort when given a read-only database. Now they no longer create directory documents and simply return a NULL object if the directory does not exist, as documented.

Fix compilation of ruby bindings

Revert to dynamic linking, since the statically linked bindings did not work well.

Notmuch 0.13 (2012-05-15)

Command-Line Interface

JSON reply format

notmuch reply can now produce JSON output that contains the headers for a reply message and full information about the original message begin replied to. This allows MUAs to create replies intelligently. For example, an MUA that can parse HTML might quote HTML parts.

Calling notmuch reply with --format=json imposes the restriction that only a single message is returned by the search, as replying to multiple messages does not have a well-defined behavior. The default retains its current behavior for multiple message replies.

Tag exclusion

Tags can be automatically excluded from search results by adding them to the new search.exclude_tags option in the Notmuch config file.

This behaviour can be overridden by explicitly including an excluded tag in your query, for example:

    notmuch search $your_query and tag:$excluded_tag

Existing users will probably want to run notmuch setup again to add the new well-commented [search] section to the configuration file.

For new configurations, accepting the default setting will cause the tags "deleted" and "spam" to be excluded, equivalent to running:

    notmuch config set search.exclude_tags deleted spam

Raw show format changes

The output of show --format=raw has changed for multipart and message parts. Previously, the output was a mash of somewhat-parsed headers and transfer-decoded bodies. Now, such parts are reproduced faithfully from the original source. Message parts (which includes part 0) output the full message, including the message headers (but not the transfer headers). Multipart parts output the part as encoded in the original message, including the part's headers. Leaf parts, as before, output the part's transfer-decoded body.

Listing configuration items

The new config list command prints out all configuration items and their values.

Emacs Interface

Changes to tagging interface

The user-facing tagging functions in the Emacs interface have been normalized across all notmuch modes. The tagging functions are now notmuch-search-tag in search-mode, and notmuch-show-tag in show-mode. They accept a string representing a single tag change, or a list of tag changes. See 'M-x describe-function notmuch-tag' for more information.

NOTE: This breaks compatibility with old tagging functions, so user may need to update in custom configurations.

Reply improvement using the JSON format

Emacs now uses the JSON reply format to create replies. It obeys the customization variables message-citation-line-format and message-citation-line-function when creating the first line of the reply body, and it will quote HTML parts if no text/plain parts are available.

New add-on tool: notmuch-mutt

The new contrib/ tool notmuch-mutt provides Notmuch integration for the Mutt mail user agent. Using it, Mutt users can perform mail search, thread reconstruction, and mail tagging/untagging without leaving Mutt. notmuch-mutt, formerly distributed under the name mutt-notmuch by Stefano Zacchiroli, will be maintained as a notmuch contrib/ from now on.

Library changes

The API changes detailed below break binary and source compatibility, so libnotmuch has been bumped to version 3.0.0.

The function notmuch_database_close has been split into notmuch_database_close and notmuch_database_destroy

This makes it possible for long running programs to close the xapian database and thus release the lock associated with it without destroying the data structures obtained from it.

notmuch_database_open, notmuch_database_create, and notmuch_database_get_directory now return errors

The type signatures of these functions have changed so that the functions now return a notmuch_status_t and take an out-argument for returning the new database object or directory object.

Go bindings changes

Go 1 compatibility

The go bindings and the notmuch-addrlookup utility are now compatible with go 1.

Notmuch 0.12 (2012-03-20)

Command-Line Interface

Reply to sender

notmuch reply has gained the ability to create a reply template for replying just to the sender of the message, in addition to reply to all. The feature is available through the new command line option --reply-to=(all|sender).

Mail store folder/file ignore

A new configuration option, new.ignore, lets users specify a ;-separated list of file and directory names that will not be searched for messages by notmuch new.

NOTE: Every file/directory that goes by one of those names will be ignored, independent of its depth/location in the mail store.

Unified help and manual pages

The notmuch help command now runs man for the appropriate page. If you install notmuch somewhere "unusual", you may need to update MANPATH.

Manual page for notmuch configuration options

The notmuch CLI configuration file options are now documented in the notmuch-config(1) manual page in addition to the configuration file itself.

Emacs Interface

Reply to sender

The Emacs interface has, with the new CLI support, gained the ability to reply to sender in addition to reply to all. In both show and search modes, 'r' has been bound to reply to sender, replacing reply to all, which now has key binding 'R'.

More flexible and consistent tagging operations

All tagging operations ('+', '-', '*') now accept multiple tags with '+' or '-' prefix, like '*' operation in notmuch-search view before.

'*' operation (notmuch-show-tag-all) is now available in notmuch-show view.

notmuch-show-{add,remove}-tag functions no longer accept tag argument, notmuch-show-tag-message should be used instead. Custom bindings using these functions should be updated, e.g.:

    (notmuch-show-remove-tag "unread")

should be changed to:

    (notmuch-show-tag-message "-unread")

Refreshing the show view ('=' by default) no longer opens or closes messages

To get the old behavior of putting messages back in their initial opened/closed state, use a prefix argument, e.g., 'C-u ='.

Attachment buttons can be used to view or save attachments.

When the cursor is on an attachment button the key 's' can be used to save the attachment, the key 'v' to view the attachment in the default mailcap application, and the key 'o' prompts the user for an application to use to open the attachment. By default Enter or mouse button 1 saves the attachment but this is customisable (option Notmuch Show Part Button Default Action).

New functions

notmuch-show-stash-mlarchive-link{,-and-go} allow stashing and optionally visiting a URI to the current message at one of a number of Mailing List Archives.

Fix MML tag quoting in replies

The MML tag quoting fix of 0.11.1 unintentionally quoted tags inserted in message-setup-hook. Quoting is now limited to the cited message.

Show view archiving key binding changes

The show view archiving key bindings 'a' and 'x' now remove the "inbox" tag from the current message only (instead of thread), and move to the next message. At the last message, 'a' proceeds to the next thread in search results, and 'x' returns to search results. The thread archiving functions are now available in 'A' and 'X'.

Support text/calendar MIME type

The text/calendar MIME type is now supported in addition to text/x-vcalendar.

Generate inline patch fake attachment file names from message subject

Use the message subject to generate file names for the inline patch fake attachments. The names are now similar to the ones generated by 'git format-patch' instead of just "inline patch". See "Notmuch Show Insert Text/Plain Hook" in the notmuch customize interface.

Enable notmuch-search-line-faces by default

Make the notmuch-search-line-faces functionality more discoverable for new users by showing "unread" messages bold and "flagged" messages blue by default in the search view.

Printing Support

notmuch-show mode now has simple printing support, bound to '#' by default. You can customize the variable notmuch-print-mechanism.

Library changes

New functions

notmuch_query_add_tag_exclude supports the new tag exclusion feature.

Python bindings changes

Python 3.2 compatibility

The python bindings are now compatible with both python 2.5+ and 3.2.

Added missing unicode conversions

Python strings have to be encoded to and decoded from utf-8 when calling libnotmuch functions. Porting the bindings to python 3.2 revealed a few function calls that were missing these conversions.

Build fixes

Compatibility with GMime 2.6

It is now possible to build notmuch against both GMime 2.4 and 2.6. However, a bug in GMime 2.6 before 2.6.5 causes notmuch not to report signatures where the signer key is unavailable (GNOME bug 668085). For compatibility with GMime 2.4's tolerance of "From " headers we require GMime 2.6 >= 2.6.7.

Notmuch 0.11.1 (2012-02-03)

Bug-fix release

Fix error handling in python bindings

The python bindings in 0.11 failed to detect NULL pointers being returned from libnotmuch functions and thus failed to raise exceptions to indicate the error condition. Any subsequent calls into libnotmuch caused segmentation faults.

Quote MML tags in replies

MML tags are text codes that Emacs uses to indicate attachments (among other things) in messages being composed. The Emacs interface did not quote MML tags in the quoted text of a reply. User could be tricked into replying to a maliciously formatted message and not editing out the MML tags from the quoted text. This could lead to files from the user's machine being attached to the outgoing message. The Emacs interface now quotes these tags in reply text, so that they do not effect outgoing messages.

Notmuch 0.11 (2012-01-13)

Command-Line Interface

Hooks

Hooks have been introduced to notmuch. Hooks are scripts that notmuch invokes before and after certain actions. Initially, notmuch new supports pre-new and post-new hooks that are run before and after importing new messages into the database.

notmuch reply --decrypt bugfix

The notmuch reply command with --decrypt argument had a rarely occurring bug that caused an encrypted message not to be decrypted sometimes. This is now fixed.

Performance

Automatic tag query optimization

notmuch tag now automatically optimizes the user's query to exclude messages whose tags won't change. In the past, we've suggested that people do this by hand; this is no longer necessary.

Don't sort messages when creating a dump file

This speeds up tag dumps considerably, without any loss of information. To replicate the old behavior of sorted output (for example to compare two dump files), one can use e.g. sort(1).

Memory Management

Reduction of memory leaks

Two memory leaks when searching and showing messages were identified and fixed in this release.

Emacs Interface

Bug fixes

notmuch-show-advance (bound to the spacebar in notmuch-show-mode) had a bug that caused it to always jump to the next message, even if it should have scrolled down to show more of the current message instead. This is now fixed.

Support notmuch new as a notmuch-poll-script

It's now possible to use notmuch new as a notmuch-poll-script directly. This is also the new default. This allows taking better advantage of the notmuch new hooks from emacs without intermediate scripts.

Improvements in saved search management

New saved searches are now appended to the list of saved searches, not inserted in front. It's also possible to define a sort function for displaying saved searches; alphabetical sort is provided.

Hooks for notmuch-hello

Two new hooks have been added: "notmuch-hello-mode-hook" (called after entering notmuch-hello-mode) and "notmuch-hello-refresh-hook" (called after updating a notmuch-hello buffer).

New face for crypto parts headers

Crypto parts used to be displayed with a hardcoded color. A new face has been introduced to fix this: notmuch-crypto-part-header. It defaults to the same value as before, but can be customized to match other color themes.

Use space as default thousands separator

Large numbers in notmuch-hello are now displayed using a space as thousands separator (e.g. "123 456" instead of "123,456"). This can be changed by customizing "notmuch-hello-thousands-separator".

Call notmuch-show instead of notmuch-search when clicking on buttonized id: links

New function notmuch-show-advance

This new function advances through just the current thread, and is less invasive than notmuch-show-advance-and-archive. It can easily be bound to SPC with:

    (define-key notmuch-show-mode-map " " 'notmuch-show-advance)

Various performance improvements

New add-on tool

The tool contrib/notmuch-deliver helps with initial delivery and tagging of mail (replacing running notmuch new).

Notmuch 0.10.2 (2011-12-04)

Bug-fix release

Fix crash in python bindings

The python bindings did not call g_type_init, which caused crashes for some, but not all users.

Notmuch 0.10.1 (2011-11-25)

Bug-fix release

Fix --help argument

Argument processing changes in 0.10 introduced a bug where notmuch --help crashed while notmuch help worked fine. This is fixed in 0.10.1.

Notmuch 0.10 (2011-11-23)

New build and testing features

Emacs tests are now done in dtach. This means that dtach is now needed to run the notmuch test suite, at least until the checking for prerequisites is improved.

Full test coverage of the stashing feature in Emacs.

New command-line features

Add notmuch restore --accumulate option

The --accumulate switch causes the union of the existing and new tags to be applied, instead of replacing each message's tags as they are read in from the dump file.

Add search terms to notmuch dump

The dump command now takes an optional search term much like notmuch search/show/tag. The output file argument of dump is deprecated in favour of using stdout.

Add notmuch search --offset and --limit options

The search command now takes options --offset=[-]N and --limit=N to limit the number of results shown.

Add notmuch count --output option

The count command is now capable of counting threads in addition to messages. This is selected using the new --output=(threads|messages) option.

New emacs UI features

Add tab-completion for notmuch-search and notmuch-search-filter

These functions now support completion tags for query parts starting with "tag:".

Turn "id:MSG-ID" links into buttons associated with notmuch searches

Text of the form "id:MSG-ID" in mails is now a clickable button that opens a notmuch search for the given message id.

Add keybinding ('c I') for stashing Message-ID's without an id: prefix

Reduces manual labour when stashing them for use outside notmuch.

Do not query on notmuch-search exit

It is harmless to kill the external notmuch process, so the user is no longer interrogated when they interrupt a search.

Performance

Emacs now constructs large search buffers more efficiently

Search avoids opening and parsing message files

We now store more information in the database so search no longer has to open every message file to get basic headers. This can improve search speed by as much as 10X, but taking advantage of this requires a database rebuild:

    notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
    # Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
    notmuch new
    notmuch restore notmuch.dump

New collection of add-on tools

The source directory "contrib" contains tools built on notmuch. These tools are not part of notmuch, and you should check their individual licenses. Feel free to report problems with them to the notmuch mailing list.

nmbug - share tags with a given prefix

nmbug helps maintain a git repo containing all tags with a given prefix (by default "notmuch::"). Tags can be shared by commiting them to git in one location and restoring in another.

Notmuch 0.9 (2011-10-01)

New, general features

Correct handling of interruptions during notmuch new

notmuch new now operates as a series of small, self-consistent transactions, so it can correctly resume after an interruption or crash. Previously, interruption could lose existing tags, fail to detect messages on resume, or leave the database in a state temporarily or permanently inconsistent with the mail store.

Library changes

New functions

notmuch_database_begin_atomic and notmuch_database_end_atomic allow multiple database operations to be performed atomically.

notmuch_database_find_message_by_filename does exactly what it says.

API changes

notmuch_database_find_message (and n_d_f_m_by_filename) now return a status indicator and uses an output parameter for the message. This change required changing the SONAME of libnotmuch to libnotmuch.so.2

Python bindings changes

• Re-encode python unicode objects to utf-8 before passing back to libnotmuch.
• Support Database().begin_atomic()/end_atomic()
• Support Database().find_message_by_filename() NB! This needs a db opened in READ-WRITE mode currently, or it will crash the python process. The is a limitation (=bug) of the underlying libnotmuch.
• Fixes where we would not throw NotmuchErrors when we should (Justus Winter)
• Update for n_d_find_message* API changes (see above).

Ruby bindings changes

• Wrap new library functions notmuch_database_{begin,end}_atomic.
• Add new exception Notmuch::UnbalancedAtomicError.
• Rename destroy to destroy! according to Ruby naming conventions.
• Update for n_d_find_message* API changes (see above).

Emacs improvements

• Add gpg callback to crypto sigstatus buttons to retrieve/refresh signing key.
• Add notmuch-show-refresh-view function (and corresponding binding) to refresh the view of a notmuch-show buffer.

Reply formatting cleanup

notmuch reply no longer includes notification that non-leafnode MIME parts are being suppressed.

Notmuch 0.8 (2011-09-10)

Improved handling of message/rfc822 parts

Both in the CLI and the emacs interface. Output of rfc822 parts now includes the primary headers, as well as the body and all subparts. Output of the completely raw rfc822-formatted message, including all headers, is unfortunately not yet supported (but hopefully will be soon).

Improved Build system portability

Certain parts of the shell script generating notmuch.sym were specific to the GNU versions of sed and nm. The new version should be more portable to e.g. OpenBSD.

Documentation update for Ruby bindings

Added documentation, typo fixes, and improved support for rdoc.

Unicode, iterator, PEP8 changes for python bindings

• PEP8 (code formatting) changes for python files.
• Remove Tags.__len__ ; see 0.6 release notes for motivation.
• Decode headers as UTF8, encode (unicode) database paths as UTF8.

Notmuch 0.7 (2011-08-01)

Vim interface improvements

Jason Woofenden provided a number of bug fixes for the Vim interface

• fix citation/signature fold lengths
• fix cig/cit parsing within multipart/*
• fix on-screen instructions for show-signature
• fix from list reformatting in search view
• fix space key: now archives (did opposite)

Uwe Kleine-König contributed

• use full path for sendmail/doc fix
• fix compose temp file name

Python Bindings changes

Sebastian Spaeth contributed two changes related to unicode and UTF8:

• message tags are now explicitly unicode
• query string is encoded as a UTF8 byte string

Build-System improvements

Generate notmuch.sym after the relevant object files

This fixes a bug in parallel building. Thanks to Thomas Jost for the patch.

Notmuch 0.6.1 (2011-07-17)

Bug-fix release

Re-export Xapian exception typeinfo symbols

It turned out our aggressive symbol hiding caused problems for people running gcc 4.4.5.

Notmuch 0.6 (2011-07-01)

New, general features

Folder-based searching

Notmuch queries can now include a search term to match the directories in which mail files are stored (within the mail storage). The syntax is as follows:

    folder:<path>

For example, one might use things such as:

    folder:spam
    folder:2011-*
    folder:work/todo

to match any path containing a directory "spam", "work/todo", or containing a directory starting with "2011-", respectively.

This feature is particularly useful for users of delivery-agent software (such as procmail or maildrop) that is filtering mail and delivering it to particular folders, or users of systems such as Gmail that use filesystem directories to indicate message tags.

NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of notmuch will be searchable with folder: terms. In order to enable this feature for all mail, the entire notmuch index will need to be rebuilt as follows:

    notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
    # Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
    notmuch new
    notmuch restore notmuch.dump

Support for PGP/MIME

Both the command-line interface and the emacs-interface have new support for PGP/MIME, detailed below. Thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor and Jameson Graef Rollins for making this happen.

New, automatic tags: "signed" and "encrypted"

These tags will automatically be applied to messages containing multipart/signed and multipart/encrypted parts.

NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of notmuch will receive these tags.

New command-line features

Add new "notmuch show --verify" option for signature verification

This option instruct notmuch to verify the signature of PGP/MIME-signed parts.

Add new "notmuch show --decrypt" and "notmuch reply --decrypt" options

This option instructs notmuch to decrypt PGP/MIME-encrypted parts. Note that this feature currently requires gpg-agent and a passphrase entry tool (e.g. pinentry-gtk or pinentry-curses).

Proper nesting of multipart parts in "notmuch show" output

MIME parts are now display with proper nesting to reflect original MIME hierarchy of a message. This allows clients to correctly analyze the MIME structure, (such as, for example, determining to which parts a signature part applies).

Add new "notmuch show --part" option

This is a replacement for the older "notmuch part" command, (which is now deprecated—it should still work as always, but is no longer documented). Putting part output under "notmuch show" allows for all of the "notmuch show" options to be applied when extracting a single part, (such as --format=json for extracting a message part with JSON formatting).

Deprecate "notmuch search-tags" (in favor of "notmuch search --output=tags *")

The "notmuch search-tags" sub-command has been redundant since the addition of the --output=tags option to "notmuch search". We now make that more clear by deprecating "notmuch search-tags", (dropping it from the documentation). We do continue to support the old syntax by translating it internally to the new call.

Performance improvements

Faster searches (by doing fewer searches to construct threads)

Whenever a user asks for search results as threads, notmuch first performs a search for messages matching the query, then performs additional searches to find other messages in the resulting threads.

Removing inefficiencies and redundancies in these secondary searches results in a measured speedups of 1.5x for a typical search.

Faster searches (by doing fewer passes to gather message data)

Optimizing Xapian data access patterns (using a single pass to get all message-document data rather than a pass for each data type) results in a measured speedup of 1.7x for a typical search.

The benefits of this optimization combine with the preceding optimization. With both in place, Austin Clements measured a speedup of 2.5x for a search of all messages in his inbox (was 4.5s, now 1.8s). Thanks, Austin!

Faster initial indexing

More efficient indexing of new messages results in a measured speedup of 1.4x for the initial indexing of 3 GB of mail (1h 14m rather than 1h 46m). Thanks to Austin Clements and Michal Sojka.

Make "notmuch new" faster for unchanged directories

Optimizing to not do any further examinations of sub-directories when the filesystem indicates that a directory is unchanged from the last "notmuch new" results in measured speedups of 8.5 for the "No new mail" case, (was 0.77s, now 0.09s). Thanks to Karel Zak.

New emacs-interface features

Support for PGP/MIME (GnuPG)

Automatically indicate validity of signatures for multipart/signed messages. Automatically display decrypted content for multipart/encrypted messages. See the emacs variable notmuch-crypto-process-mime for more information. Note that this needs gpg-agent and a pinentry tool just as the command-line tools. Also note there is no support SMIME yet.

Output of pipe command is now displayed if pipe command fails

This is extremely useful in the common use case of piping a patch to "git am". If git fails to cleanly merge the patch the error messages from the failed merge are now clearly displayed to the user, (where previously they were silently hidden from the user).

User-selectable From address

A user can choose which configured email addresses should be used as the From address whenever composing a new message. To do so, simply press C-u before the command which will open a new message. Emacs will prompt for the from address to use.

The user can customize the "Notmuch Identities" setting in the notmuch customize group in order to use addresses other than those in the notmuch configuration file if desired.

The user can also choose to always be prompted for the from address when composing a new message (without having to use C-u) by setting the "Notmuch Always Prompt For Sender" option in the notmuch customize group.

Hiding of repeated subjects in collapsed thread view

In notmuch-show mode, if a collapsed message has the same subject as its parent, the subject is not shown.

Automatic detection and hiding of original message in top-posted message

When a message contains a line looking something like:

    ----- Original Message -----

emacs hides this and all subsequent lines as an "original message", (allowing the user to click or press enter on the "original message" button to display it again). This makes the handling of top-posted citations work much like conventional citations.

New hooks for running code when tags are modified

Some users want to perform additional actions whenever a particular tag is added/removed from a message. This could be used to, for example, interface with some external spam-recognition training tool. To facilitate this, two new hooks are added which can be modified in the following settings of the notmuch customize group:

    Notmuch Before Tag Hook
    Notmuch After Tag Hook

New optional support for hiding some multipart/alternative parts

Many emails are sent with redundant content within a multipart/alternative group (such as a text/plain part as well as a text/html part). Users can configure the setting:

    Notmuch Show All Multipart/Alternative Parts

to "off" in the notmuch customize group to have the interface automatically hide some part alternatives (such as text/html parts). This new part hiding is not configured by default yet because there's not yet a simple way to re-display such a hidden part if it is not actually redundant with a displayed part.

Better rendering of text/x-vcalendar parts

These parts are now displayed in a format suitable for use with the emacs diary.

Avoid getting confused by Subject and Author fields with newline characters

Replacing all characters with ASCII code less than 32 with a question mark.

Cleaner display of From line in email messages

Remove double quotes, and drop "name" if it's actually just a repeat of the email address.

Vim interface improvements

Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface:

• Using sendmail directly rather than mailx,
• Implementing archive in show view
• Add support to mark as read in show and search views
• Add delete commands
• Various cleanups.

Bindings improvements

Ruby bindings are now much more complete

Including QUERY.sort, QUERY.to_s, MESSAGE.maildir_flags_to_tags, MESSAGE.tags_to_maildir_flags, and MESSAGE.get_filenames

Python bindings have been updated and extended

(docs online at http://packages.python.org/notmuch/)

New bindings:

• Message().get_filenames(), Message().tags_to_maildir_flags(), Message().maildir_flags_to_tags(), list(Threads()) and list(Messages) works now
• Message().__cmp__() and __hash__()

These allow, for example:

    if msg1 == msg2: ...

As well as set arithmetic on Messages():

    s1, s2 = set(msgs1), set(msgs2)
    s1.union(s2)
    s2 -= s1

Removed:

• len(Messages()) as it exhausted the iterator

Use len(list(Messages())) or Query.count_messages() to get the length.

Added initial Go bindings in bindings/go

New build-system features

Added support for building in a directory other than the source directory

This can be used with the widely-supported idiom of simply running the configure script from some other directory:

    mkdir build
    cd build
    ../configure
    make

Fix to save configure options for future, implicit runs of configure

When a user updates the source (such as with "git pull") calling "make" may cause an automatic re-run of the configure script. When this happens, the configure script will automatically be called with the same options the user originally passed in the most-recent manual invocation of configure.

New test-suite feature

Binary for bash for running test suite now located via PATH

The notmuch test suite requires a fairly recent version of bash (>= bash 4). As some systems supply an older version of bash at /bin/bash, the test suite is now updated to search $PATH to locate the bash binary. This allows users of systems with old /bin/bash to simply install bash >= 4 somewhere on $PATH before /bin and then use the test suite.

Support for testing output with a trailing newline

Previously, some tests would fail to notice a difference in the presence/absence of a trailing newline in a program output, (which has led to bugs in the past). Now, carefully-written tests (using test_expect_equal_file rather than test_expect_equal) will detect any change in the presence/absence of a trailing newline. Many tests are updated to take advantage of this.

Avoiding accessing user's $HOME while running test suite

The test suite now carefully creates its own HOME directory. This allows the test suite to be run with no existing HOME directory, (as some build systems apparently do), and avoids test-suite differences due to configuration files in the users HOME directory.

General bug fixes

Output all files for "notmuch search --output=files"

For the cases where multiple files have the same Message ID, previous versions of notmuch would output only one such file. This command is now fixed to correctly output all files.

Fixed spurious search results from "overlapped" indexing of addresses

This fixed a bug where a search for:

    to:user@elsewhere.com

would incorrectly match a message sent:

    To: user@example,com, someone@elsewhere.com

Fix --output=json when search has no results

A bug present since notmuch 0.4 had caused searches with no results to produce an invalid json object. This is now fixed to cleanly return a valid json object representing an empty array "[]" as expected.

Fix the automatic detection of the From address for "notmuch reply" from the Received headers in some cases

Fix core dump on DragonFlyBSD due to -1 return value from sysconf(_SC_GETPW_R_SIZE_MAX)

Cleaned up several memory leaks

Eliminated a few, rare segmentation faults and a double-free

Fix libnotmuch library to only export notmuch API functions

Previous release of the notmuch library also exported some Xapian C++ exception type symbols. These were never part of the library interface and were never intended to be exported.

Emacs-interface bug fixes

Display any unexpected output or errors from "notmuch search" invocations

Previously any misformatted output or trailing error messages were silently ignored. This output is now clearly displayed. This fix was very helpful in identifying and fixing the bug described below.

Fix bug where some threads would be missing from large search results

When a search returned a "large" number of results, the emacs interface was incorrectly dropping one thread every time the output of the "notmuch search" process spanned the emacs read-buffer. This is now fixed.

Avoid re-compression of .gz files (and similar) when saving attachment

Emacs was being too clever for its own good and trying to re-compress pre-compressed .gz files when saving such attachments (potentially corrupting the attachment). The emacs interface is fixed to avoid this bug.

Fix hiding of a message when a previously-hidden citation is visible

Previously the citation would remain visible in this case. This is fixed so that hiding a message hides all parts.

Notmuch 0.5 (2010-11-11)

New, general features

Maildir-flag synchronization

Notmuch now knows how to synchronize flags in maildir filenames with tags in the notmuch database. The following flag/tag mappings are supported:

    Flag <-> Tag
    ----     -----
    'D'      draft
    'F'      flagged
    'P'      passed
    'R'      replied
    'S'      unread (added when 'S' flag is not present)

The synchronization occurs in both directions, (for example, adding the 'S' flag to a file will cause the "unread" tag to be added, and adding the "replied" tag to a message will cause the file to be renamed with an 'R' flag).

This synchronization is enabled by default for users of the command-line interface, (though only files in directories named "cur" or "new" will be renamed). It can be disabled by setting the new maildir.synchronize_flags option in the configuration file. For example:

    notmuch config set maildir.synchronize_flags false

Users upgrading may also want to run "notmuch setup" once (just accept the existing configuration) to get a new, nicely-commented [maildir] section added to the configuration file.

For users of the notmuch library, the new synchronization functionality is available with the following two new functions:

    notmuch_message_maildir_flags_to_tags
    notmuch_message_tags_to_maildir_flags

It is anticipated that future improvements to this support will allow for safe synchronization of the 'T' flag with the "deleted" tag, as well as support for custom flag/tag mappings.

New library features

Support for querying multiple filenames for a single message

It is common for the mailstore to contain multiple files with the same message ID. Previously, notmuch would always hide these duplicate files, (returning a single, arbitrary filename with notmuch_message_get_filename).

With this release, library users can access all filenames for a message with the new function:

    notmuch_message_get_filenames

Together with notmuch_filenames_valid, notmuch_filenames_get, and notmuch_filenames_move_to_next it is now possible to iterate over all available filenames for a given message.

New command-line features

New "notmuch show --format=raw" for getting at original email contents

This new feature allows for a fully-functional email client to be built on top of the notmuch command-line without needing any direct access to the mail store itself.

For example, it's now possible to run "emacs -f notmuch" on a local machine with only ssh access to the mail store/notmuch database. To do this, simply set the notmuch-command variable in emacs to the name of a script containing:

    ssh user@host notmuch "$@"

If the ssh client has enabled connection sharing (ControlMaster option in OpenSSH), the emacs interface can be quite responsive this way.

General bug fixes

Fix "notmuch search" to print nothing when nothing matches

The 0.4 release had a bug in which:

    notmuch search <expression-with-no-matches>

would produce a single blank line of output, (where previous versions would produce no output. This fix also causes a change in the --format=json output, (which would previously produce "[]" and now produces nothing).

Emacs interface improvements

Fix to allow pipe ('|') command to work when using notmuch over ssh

Fix count of lines in hidden signatures

Omit repeated subject lines in (collapsed) thread display

Display current thread subject in a header line

Provide a "c i" binding to copy a thread ID from the search view

Allow for notmuch-fcc-dirs to have a value of nil

Also, the more complex form of notmuch-fcc-dirs now has a slightly different format. It no longer has a special first-element, fallback string. Instead it's now a list of cons cells where the car of each cell is a regular expression to be matched against the sender address, and the cdr is the name of a folder to use for an FCC. So the old fallback behavior can be achieved by including a final cell of (".*" . "default-fcc-folder").

Vim interface improvements

Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface

These include optimizations, support for newer versions of vim, fixed support for sending mail on modern systems, new commands, and various cleanups.

New bindings

Added initial ruby bindings in bindings/ruby

Notmuch 0.4 (2010-11-01)

New command-line features

notmuch search --output=(summary|threads|messages|tags|files)

This new option allows for particular items to be returned from notmuch searches. The "summary" option is the default and behaves just as "notmuch search" has historically behaved.

The new option values allow for thread IDs, message IDs, lists of tags, and lists of filenames to be returned from searches. It is expected that this new option will be very useful in shell scripts. For example:

    for file in $(notmuch search --output=files <search-terms>); do
            <operations-on> "$file"
    done

notmuch show --format=mbox <search-specification>

This new option allows for the messages matching a search specification to be presented as an mbox. Specifically the "mboxrd" format is used which allows for reversible quoting of lines beginning with "From ". A reader should remove a single '>' from the beginning of all lines beginning with one or more '>' characters followed by the 5 characters "From ".

notmuch config [get|set] <section>.<item> [value ...]

The new top-level "config" command allows for any value in the notmuch configuration file to be queried or set to a new value. Both single-valued and multi-valued items are supported, as our any custom items stored in the configuration file.

Avoid setting Bcc header in "notmuch reply"

We decided that this was a bit heavy-handed as the actual mail user-agent should be responsible for setting any Bcc option. Also, see below for the notmuch/emacs user-agent now setting an Fcc by default rather than Bcc.

New library features

Add notmuch_query_get_query_string and notmuch_query_get_sort

These are simply functions for querying properties of a notmuch_query_t object.

New emacs features

Enable Fcc of all sent messages by default (to "sent" directory)

All messages sent from the emacs interface will now be saved to the notmuch mail store where they will be incorporated to the database by the next "notmuch new". By default, messages are saved to the "sent" directory at the top-level of the mail store. This directory can be customized by means of the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" option in the notmuch customize interface.

Ability to all open messages in a thread to a pipe

Historically, the '|' keybinding allows for piping a single message to an external command. Now, by prefixing this key with a prefix argument, (for example, by pressing "Control-U |"), all open messages in the current thread will be sent to the external command.

Optional support for detecting inline patches

This hook is disabled by default but can be enabled with a checkbox under "Notmuch Show Insert Text/Plain Hook" in the notmuch customize interface. It allows for inline patches to be detected and treated as if they were attachments, (with context-sensitive highlighting).

Automatically tag messages as "replied" when sending a reply

Messages replied to within the emacs interface will now be tagged as "replied". This feature can easily be customized to add or remove other tags as well. For example, a user might use a tag of "needs-reply" and can configure this feature to automatically remove that tag when replying. See "Notmuch Message Mark Replied" in the notmuch customize interface.

Allow search-result color specifications to overlay each other

For example, one tag can specify the background color of matching lines, while another can specify the foreground. With this change, both settings will now be visible simultaneously, (which was not the case in previous releases). See "Notmuch Search Line Faces" in the notmuch customize interface.

Make hidden author names still available for incremental search

When there is insufficient space to display all authors of a thread in search results, the names of hidden authors are now still made available to emacs' incremental search commands. As the user searches, matching lines will temporarily expand to show the hidden names.

New binding of Control-TAB (works like TAB in reverse)

Many notmuch nodes already use TAB to navigate forward through various items allowing actions, (message headers, email attachments, etc.). The new Control-TAB binding operates similarly but in the opposite direction.

New build-system features

Various portability fixes have been applied

These include fixes for build failures on at least Solaris, FreeBSD, and Fedora systems. We're hopeful that the notmuch code base is now more portable than ever before.

Arrange for libnotmuch to be found automatically after make install

The notmuch build system is now careful to help the user avoid errors of the form "libnotmuch.so could not be found" immediately after installing. This support takes two forms:

1. If the library is installed to a system directory, (configured in /etc/ld.so.conf), then "make install" will automatically run ldconfig.

2. If the library is installed to a non-system directory, the build system adds a DR_RUNPATH entry to the final binary pointing to the directory to which the library is installed.

When this support works, the user should be able to run notmuch immediately after "make install", without any errors trying to find the notmuch library, and without having to manually set environment variables such as LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

Check compiler/linker options before using them

The configure script now carefully checks that any desired compilation options, (whether for enabling compiler warnings, or for embedding rpath, etc.), are supported. Only supported options are used in the resulting Makefile.

New test-suite features

New modularization of test suite

Thanks to a gracious relicensing of the test-suite infrastructure from the git project, notmuch now has a modular test suite. This provides the ability to run individual sections of the test suite rather than the whole things. It also provides better summary of test results, with support for tests that are expected to fail (BROKEN and FIXED) in addition to PASS and FAIL. Finally, it makes it easy to run the test suite within valgrind (pass --valgrind to notmuch-test or to any sub-script) which has been very useful.

New testing of emacs interface

The test suite has been augmented to allow automated testing of the emacs interfaces. So far, this includes basic searches, display of threads, and tag manipulation. This also includes a test that a new message can successfully be sent out through a (dummy) SMTP server and that said message is successfully integrated into the notmuch database via the FCC setting.

General bug fixes

Fix potential corruption of database when "notmuch new" is interrupted

Previously, an interruption of "notmuch new" would (rarely) result in a corrupt database. The corruption would manifest itself by a persistent error of the form:

    document ID of 1234 has no thread ID

The message-adding code has been carefully audited and reworked to avoid this sort of corruption regardless of when it is interrupted.

Fix failure with extremely long message ID headers

Previously, a message with an extremely long message ID, (say, more than 300 characters), would fail to be added to notmuch, (triggering Xapian exceptions). This has now been fixed.

Fix for messages with "charset=unknown-8bit"

Previously, messages with this charset would cause notmuch to emit a GMime warning, (which would then trip up emacs or other interfaces parsing the notmuch results).

Fix notmuch_query_search_threads function to return NULL on any exception

Fix "notmuch search" to return non-zero if notmuch_query_search_threads fails

Previously, this command could confusingly report a Xapian exception, yet still return an error code of 0. It now correctly returns a failing error code of 1 in this case.

Emacs bug fixes

Fix to handle a message with a subject containing, for example "[1234]"

Previously, a message subject containing a sequence of digits within square brackets would cause the emacs interface to mis-parse the output of "notmuch search". This would result in the message being mis-displayed and prevent the user from manipulating the message in the emacs interface.

Fix to correctly handle message IDs containing ".."

The emacs interface now properly quotes message IDs to avoid a Xapian bug in which the ".." within a message ID would be misinterpreted as a numeric range specification.

Python-binding fixes

The python bindings for notmuch have been updated to work with python3.

Debian-specific fixes

Fix emacs initialization so "M-x notmuch" works for users by default

Now, a new Debian user can immediately run "emacs -f notmuch" after "apt-get install notmuch". Previously, the user would have had to edit the ~/.emacs file to add "(require 'notmuch)" before this would work.

Notmuch 0.3.1 (2010-04-27)

General bug fixes

Fix an infinite loop in "notmuch reply"

This bug could be triggered by replying to a message where the user's primary email address did not appear in the To: header and the user had not configured any secondary email addresses. The bug was a simple re-use of the same iterator variable in nested loops.

Fix a potential SEGV in "notmuch search"

This bug could be triggered by an author name ending in a ','. Admittedly - that's almost certainly a spam email, but we never want notmuch to crash.

Emacs bug fixes

Fix calculations for line wrapping in the primary "notmuch" view

Fix Fcc support to prompt to create a directory if the specified Fcc directory does not exist

Build fix

Fix build on OpenSolaris (at least) due to missing 'extern "C"' block

Without this, the C++ sources could not find strcasestr and the final linking of notmuch would fail.

Notmuch 0.3 (2010-04-27)

New command-line features

User-configurable tags for new messages

A new "new.tags" option is available in the configuration file to determine which tags are applied to new messages. Run "notmuch setup" to generate new documentation within ~/.notmuch-config on how to specify this value.

Threads search results named based on subjects that match search

This means that when new mails arrived to a thread you've previously read, and the new mails have a new subject, you will see that subject in the search results rather than the old subject.

Faster operation of "notmuch tag" (avoid unneeded sorting)

Since the user just wants to tag all matching messages, we can make things perform a bit faster by avoiding the sort.

Even Better guessing of From: header for "notmuch reply"

Notmuch now looks at a number of headers when trying to figure out the best From: header to use in a reply. This is helpful if you have several configured email addresses, and you also subscribe to various mailing lists with different addresses, (so that mails you are replying to won't always include your subscribed address in the To: header).

Indication of author names that match a search

When notmuch displays threads as the result of a search, it now lists the authors that match the search before listing the other authors in the thread. It inserts a pipe '|' symbol between the last matching and first non-matching author. This is especially useful in a search that includes tag:unread. Now the authors of the unread messages in the thread are listed first.

New: Python bindings

Sebastian Spaeth has contributed his python bindings for the notmuch library to the central repository. These bindings were previously known as "cnotmuch" within python but have now been renamed to be accessible with a simple, and more official-looking "import notmuch".

The bindings have already proven very useful as people proficient in python have been able to easily develop programs to do notmuch-based searches for email-address completion, maildir-flag synchronization, and other tasks.

These bindings are available within the bindings/python directory, but are not yet integrated into the top-level Makefiles, nor the top-level package-building scripts. Improvements are welcome.

Emacs interface improvements

An entirely new initial view for notmuch, (friendly yet powerful)

Some of us call the new view "notmuch hello" but you can get at it by simply calling "emacs -f notmuch". The new view provides a search bar where new searches can be performed. It also displays a list of recent searches, along with a button to save any of these, giving it a new name as a "saved search". Many people find these "saved searches" one of the most convenient ways of organizing their mail, (providing all of the features of "folders" in other mail clients, but without any of the disadvantages).

Finally, this view can also optionally display all of the tags that exist in the database, along with a count for each tag, and a custom search of messages with that tag that's simply a click (or keypress) away.

NOTE: For users that liked the original mode of "emacs -f notmuch" immediately displaying a particular search result, we recommend instead running something like:

    emacs --eval '(notmuch search "tag:inbox" t)'

The "t" means to sort the messages in an "oldest first" order, (as notmuch would do previously by default). You can also leave that off to have your search results in "newest first" order.

Full-featured "customize" support for configuring notmuch

Notmuch now plugs in well to the emacs "customize" mode to make it much simpler to find things about the notmuch interface that can be tweaked by the user.

You can get to this mode by starting at the main "Customize" menu in emacs, then browsing through "Applications", "Mail", and "Notmuch". Or you can go straight to "M-x customize-group" "notmuch".

Once you're at the customize screen, you'll see a list of documented options that can be manipulated along with checkboxes, drop-down selectors, and text-entry boxes for configuring the various settings.

Support for doing tab-completion of email addresses

This support currently relies on an external program, (notmuch-addresses), that is not yet shipped with notmuch itself. But multiple, suitable implementations of this program have already been written that generate address completions by doing notmuch searches of your email collection. For example, providing first those addresses that you have composed messages to in the past, etc.

One such program (implemented in python with the python bindings to notmuch) is available via:

    git clone  http://jkr.acm.jhu.edu/git/notmuch_addresses.git

Install that program as notmuch-addresses on your PATH, and then hitting TAB on a partial email address or name within the To: or Cc: line of an email message will provide matching completions.

Support for file-based (Fcc) delivery of sent messages to mail store

This isn't yet enabled by default. To enable this, one will have to set the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" setting within the notmuch customize screen, (see its documentation there for details). We anticipate making this automatic in a future release.

New 'G' key binding to trigger mail refresh (G == "Get new mail")

The 'G' key works wherever '=' works. Before refreshing the screen it calls an external program that can be used to poll email servers, run notmuch new and setup specific tags for the new emails. The script to be called should be configured with the "Notmuch Poll Script" setting in the customize interface. This script will typically invoke "notmuch new" and then perhaps several "notmuch tag" commands.

Implement emacs message display with the JSON output from notmuch

This is much more robust than the previous implementation, (where some HTML mails and mail quoting the notmuch code with the delimiter characters in it would cause the parser to fall over).

Better handling of HTML messages and MIME attachments (inline images!)

Allow for any MIME parts that emacs can display to be displayed inline. This includes inline viewing of image attachments, (provided the window is large enough to fit the image at its natural size).

Much more robust handling of HTML messages. Currently both text/plain and text/html alternates will be rendered next to each other. In a future release, users will be able to decide to see only one or the other representation.

Each attachment now has its own button so that attachments can be saved individually (the 'w' key is still available to save all attachments).

Customizable support for tidying of text/plain message content

Many new functions are available for tidying up message content. These include options such as wrapping long lines, compressing duplicate blank lines, etc.

Most of these are disabled by default, but can easily be enabled by clicking the available check boxes under the "Notmuch Show Insert Text/Plain Hook" within the notmuch customize screen.

New support for searchable citations (even when hidden)

When portions of overly-long citations are hidden, the contents of these citations will still be available for emacs' standard "incremental search" functions. When the search matches any portion of a hidden citation, the citation will become visible temporarily to display the search result.

More flexible handling of header visibility

As an answer to complaints from many users, the To, Cc, and Date headers of messages are no longer hidden by default. For those users that liked that these were hidden, a new "Notmuch Messages Headers Visible" option in the customize interface can be set to nil. The visibility of headers can still be toggled on a per-message basis with the 'h' keybinding.

For users that don't want to see some subset of those headers, the new "Notmuch Message Headers" variable can be customized to list only those headers that should be present in the display of a message.

The Return key now toggles message visibility anywhere

Previously this worked only on the first summary-line of a message.

Customizable formatting of search results

The user can easily customize the order, width, and formatting of the various fields in a "notmuch search" buffer. See the "Notmuch Search Result Format" section of the customize interface.

Generate nicer names for search buffers when using a saved search

Add a notmuch User-Agent header when sending mail from notmuch/emacs

New keybinding (M-Ret) to open all collapsed messages in a thread

New library feature

Provide a new NOTMUCH_SORT_UNSORTED value for queries

This can be somewhat faster when sorting simply isn't desired. For example when collecting a set of messages that will all be manipulated identically, (adding a tag, removing a tag, deleting the messages), then there's no advantage to sorting the messages by date.

Build fixes

Fix to compile against GMime 2.6

Previously notmuch insisted on being able to find GMime 2.4, (even though GMime 2.6 would have worked all along).

Fix configure script to accept (and ignore) various standard options

For example, those that the Gentoo build scripts expect configure to accept are now all accepted.

Test suite

A large number of new tests for the many new features

Better display of output from failed tests

Now shows failures with diff rather than forcing the user to gaze at complete actual and expected output looking for deviation.

Notmuch 0.2 (2010-04-16)

This is the second release of the notmuch mail system, with actual detailed release notes this time!

This release consists of a number of minor new features that make notmuch more pleasant to use, and a few fairly major bug fixes.

We didn't quite hit our release target of "about a week" from the 0.1 release, (0.2 is happening 11 days after 0.1), but we hope to do better for next week. Look forward to some major features coming to notmuch in subsequent releases.

-Carl

General features

Better guessing of From: header

Notmuch now tries harder to guess which configured address should be used as the From: line in a "notmuch reply". It will examine the Received: headers if it fails to find any configured address in To: or Cc:. This allows it to often choose the correct address even when replying to a message sent to a mailing list, and not directly to a configured address.

Make "notmuch count" with no arguments count all messages

Previously, it was hard to construct a search term that was guaranteed to match all messages.

Provide a new special-case search term of "*" to match all messages

This can be used in any command accepting a search term, such as "notmuch search '*'". Note that you'll want to take care that the shell doesn't expand * against the current files. And note that the support for "*" is a special case. It's only meaningful as a single search term and loses its special meaning when combined with any other search terms.

Automatically detect thread connections even when a parent message is missing

Previously, if two or more message were received with a common parent, but that parent was not received, then these messages would not be recognized as belonging to the same thread. This is now fixed so that such messages are properly connected in a thread.

General bug fixes

Fix potential data loss in "notmuch new" with SIGINT

One code path in "notmuch new" was not properly handling SIGINT. Previously, this could lead to messages being removed from the database (and their tags being lost) if the user pressed Control-C while "notmuch new" was working.

Fix segfault when a message includes a MIME part that is empty

Fix handling of non-ASCII characters with --format=json

Previously, characters outside the range of 7-bit ASCII were silently dropped from the JSON output. This led to corrupted display of utf-8 content in the upcoming notmuch web-based frontends.

Fix headers to be properly decoded in "notmuch reply"

Previously, the user might see:

    Subject: Re: =?iso-8859-2?q?Rozlu=E8ka?=

rather than:

    Subject: Re: Rozlučka

The former text is properly encoded to be RFC-compliant SMTP, will be sent correctly, and will be properly decoded by the recipient. But the user trying to edit the reply would likely be unable to read or edit that field in its encoded form.

Emacs client features

Show the last few lines of citations as well as the first few lines

It's often the case that the last sentence of a citation is what is being replied to directly, so the last few lines are often much more important. The number of lines shown at the beginning and end of any citation can be configured, (notmuch-show-citation-lines-prefix and notmuch-show-citation-lines-suffix).

The '+' and '-' commands in the search view can now add and remove tags by region

Selective bulk tagging is now possible by selecting a region of threads and then using either the '+' or '-' keybindings. Bulk tagging is still available for all threads matching the current search with the '*' binding.

More meaningful buffer names for thread-view buffers

Notmuch now uses the Subject of the thread as the buffer name. Previously it was using the thread ID, which is a meaningless number to the user.

Provide for customized colors of threads in search view based on tags

See the documentation of notmuch-search-line-faces, (or us "M-x customize" and browse to the "notmuch" group within "Applications" and "Mail"), for details on how to configure this colorization.

Build-system features

Add support to properly build libnotmuch on Darwin systems (OS X)

Add support to configure for many standard options

We include actual support for:

    --includedir --mandir --sysconfdir

And accept and silently ignore several more:

    --build --infodir --libexecdir --localstatedir
    --disable-maintainer-mode --disable-dependency-tracking

Install emacs client in "make install" rather than requiring a separate "make install-emacs"

Automatically compute versions numbers between releases

This support uses the git-describe notation, so a version such as 0.1-144-g43cbbfc indicates a version that is 144 commits since the 0.1 release and is available as git commit "43cbbfc".

Add a new "make test" target to run the test suite and actually verify its results

Notmuch 0.1 (2010-04-05)

This is the first release of the notmuch mail system.

It includes the libnotmuch library, the notmuch command-line interface, and an emacs-based interface to notmuch.

Note: Notmuch will work best with Xapian 1.0.18 (or later) or Xapian 1.1.4 (or later). Previous versions of Xapian (whether 1.0 or 1.1) had a performance bug that made notmuch very slow when modifying tags. This would cause distracting pauses when reading mail while notmuch would wait for Xapian when removing the "inbox" and "unread" tags from messages in a thread.