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Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

eamonnsullivan.co.uk

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Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#21

Post by gloghmalogh »

neonnoodle wrote: post #20

I wish there were a good workaround for those of us condemned to MS365/Outlook. Outlook desktop is very unstable and buggy, and Outlook web is full of weird antipatterns. For example, it is absurdly annoying to get a direct link to an e-mail message in Outlook web. If it were easy, I would just pass that url to org-protocol in the browser and keep my tasks organized with backlinks to the e-mails that originated those…

I have been able to use mu4e with my o365 account using davmail (https://davmail.sourceforge.net/). I will say it was a bit of a pain to get authentication right, and involved a lot of trial and error.

Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#22

Post by toprerules »

I switched to mutt, started getting through my email in half the time in took me using a GUI, and never looked back.

Being able to write simple expressions to filter email, mass delete, and avoid embedded javascript are killer features. I can run all html through w3m and still have nicely rendered emails.

I still use a phone app for on the go browsing, but during work hours I have mutt open alongside neovim all day long.

Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#23

Post by antoine-levitt »

gloghmalogh wrote: post #21
neonnoodle wrote: post #20

I wish there were a good workaround for those of us condemned to MS365/Outlook. Outlook desktop is very unstable and buggy, and Outlook web is full of weird antipatterns. For example, it is absurdly annoying to get a direct link to an e-mail message in Outlook web. If it were easy, I would just pass that url to org-protocol in the browser and keep my tasks organized with backlinks to the e-mails that originated those…

I have been able to use mu4e with my o365 account using davmail ( https://davmail.sourceforge.net/ ). I will say it was a bit of a pain to get authentication right, and involved a lot of trial and error.

Could you share a bit more details on your config?

Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#25

Post by abbefaria27 »

I tried setting up mu4e once. It wasn’t worth it. It took me literally a few hours of reading random blog posts to figure out the configuration, and that was only to download email. Never got around to setting up sending them, which is a totally separate process. Even then, there were lots of issues. First, it’s slow. Loading an email had a noticeable pause and was slower than GMail. Also, you can’t avoid HTML email nowadays. There’s a very basic render, but expect all the formatting to be wrong. I also ran into rate limits from Google because we get way too much email at work. That’s not mu4e’s fault, but just another obstacle. Can’t really have my inbox be one hour behind real time.

Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#26

Post by kkylin »

abbefaria27 wrote: post #25

I tried setting up mu4e once. It wasn’t worth it. It took me literally a few hours of reading random blog posts to figure out the configuration, and that was only to download email. Never got around to setting up sending them, which is a totally separate process. Even then, there were lots of issues. First, it’s slow. Loading an email had a noticeable pause and was slower than GMail. Also, you can’t avoid HTML email…

I have been using mu4e for years, and am generally happy with it, and yet... I've never recommended it to anyone else. Unlike, say, org-mode or magit, which I'd happily evangelize.

The pain points are what other commenters have said:

- I don't find the default config a good fit for me, and run it heavily customized. As someone said everything in Emacs turns into a project...

- Performance can be an issue, especially indexing new mail (and especially if you like to lug around a copy of most of your emails locally as I do). On a laptop while traveling this used to be more of a problem, but newer versions are notieably quicker and newer laptops have better battery life.

- HTML rendering isn't great. Thankfully I don't get too many important messages that isn't just plain text. This might be a reasonable use case for xwidget-webkit though I'd imagine there are security/privacy issues to work out. (Another Emacs project -- yay!)

When I started I thought it would be an efficient way to get through lots of emails, and it has been for the most part. I'm just not sure I've saved time overall unless one counts the hours configuring it as "entertainment / hobby" rather than "work".

Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#27

Post by dietr1ch »

abbefaria27 wrote: post #25

I tried setting up mu4e once. It wasn’t worth it. It took me literally a few hours of reading random blog posts to figure out the configuration, and that was only to download email. Never got around to setting up sending them, which is a totally separate process. Even then, there were lots of issues. First, it’s slow. Loading an email had a noticeable pause and was slower than GMail. Also, you can’t avoid HTML email…

> Also, you can’t avoid HTML email nowadays

This is the reason I haven't tried all the email tools that seem fun to play with, but not worth it :/

Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#28

Post by sir »

Re: the OAuth issues: to remove some of the hassle of this, you can use my proxy/relay to allow any IMAP (or POP/SMTP) client to be used with a “modern” email provider, regardless of whether the client supports OAuth 2.0 natively: https://github.com/simonrob/email-oauth2-proxy. No need for your client to know about OAuth at all.

Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#29

Post by tmtvl »

I use isync (mbsync), mu, and Emacs for my e-mail needs and it work fine. Both isync and mu4e needed a bit of configuration (and Emacs itself needed one change to stop automatically breaking lines), but it's been working well for years now. I previously used Thunderbird but its editor was garbage, so then I tried a few things (neomutt and I believe something called alpine or something like that) before settling on Emacs. I tried Notmuch, but it didn't work so well with the upstream mailboxes.

Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#30

Post by andrew-jack »

dietr1ch wrote: post #27
abbefaria27 wrote: post #25

I tried setting up mu4e once. It wasn’t worth it. It took me literally a few hours of reading random blog posts to figure out the configuration, and that was only to download email. Never got around to setting up sending them, which is a totally separate process. Even then, there were lots of issues. First, it’s slow. Loading an email had a noticeable pause and was slower than GMail. Also, you can’t avoid HTML email…

> Also, you can’t avoid HTML email nowadays This is the reason I haven't tried all the email tools that seem fun to play with, but not worth it :/

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