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