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| | 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/plan
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 th '*' 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.
|