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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

#11

Post by sndean »

qazxcvbnm wrote: post #9

By the way, anyone have experience using emacs to analyse and visualise data (think spreadsheets and charts)? I’d really like to be able to use it to view any sort of data I happen to have.

My first thought was Emacs Speaks Statistics (ESS) to do this in Emacs via R, but I bet there are many alternatives.

Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#12

Post by deltasquared »

qazxcvbnm wrote: post #9

By the way, anyone have experience using emacs to analyse and visualise data (think spreadsheets and charts)? I’d really like to be able to use it to view any sort of data I happen to have.

Yes! Org-table is a spreadsheet. org-babel will run SQLite and gnuplot.

Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#14

Post by internet_points »

deltasquared wrote: post #12
qazxcvbnm wrote: post #9

By the way, anyone have experience using emacs to analyse and visualise data (think spreadsheets and charts)? I’d really like to be able to use it to view any sort of data I happen to have.

Yes! Org-table is a spreadsheet. org-babel will run SQLite and gnuplot.

there is also https://gitlab.com/dto/cell-mode and https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/ses.html... and https://github.com/ShuguangSun/ess-view-data

though I tend to stick with org

Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#15

Post by setopt »

eamonnsullivan wrote: post #5
mickeyp wrote: post #3

Have you tried using the hardcoded Thunderbird (or similar) oauth credentials to authenticate to Google et al? You can also use davmail to proxy your requests to Office 365 / Exchange and it handles oauth also.

I tried both. The error from davmail suggests it was specifically blocked/prohibit and I failed using actual Thunderbird.

My organization also explicitly blocks access from other clients than Microsoft Outlook, even if the credentials are correct and the protocol is supported. They also refused providing an exception, citing that I can just use the web interface via Microsoft Edge on Linux. (Which I prefer not to do for many reasons, e.g. backing up my emails locally, working offline, and authoring using native tools.)

Currently, only Thunderbird with the proprietary "OWL" extension somehow manages to connect despite the block. My understanding is that they somehow abuse the web interface to do so, instead of actually going through the proper protocols, but not sure.

If someone has another way to access Exchange servers that intentionally blocks non-Outlook clients I’d love to hear about it.

Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#16

Post by finaard »

smartmic wrote: post #8
jwr wrote: post #2

Thanks, keeping this as a reference — I'm trying to find some time to try mu4e. I used Gnus for many years, then switched to Apple Mail.app, but with the gradual decline of MacOS (and Mail.app) I'm looking to switch back. I remember the two main reasons I switched from Gnus: 1) there was no good reliable search, 2) I couldn't drag&drop attachments into E-mails and back so I was spending a lot of time pointing to file…

I am a Gnus user. My 2 cents… concerning (1): I have no offline sync in place, all my emails stay on the server. The IMAP protocol has a decent server-side search included[0], combined with Gnus unified search syntax[1], I enjoy a hassle-free search experience. [0]: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Sea... [1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Sea...

gnus had some massive IMAP performance improvements a few years (probably close to a decade now) ago. Before that it was quite painful to use it on large mailboxes without a local imap - I used to sync that with offlineimap. When they had a massive issue moving from python2 to python3, and keeping that running on a modern distro started getting painful I tried it without local imap - and realised those improvements made things fast enough that you can run it on remote mailboxes, and even do so in your main emacs instance.

Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#18

Post by komali2 »

I was in this world for like 8 years but switched to Thunderbird after one too many emails didn't send because I missed some notification or something in mu4e, and too many emails weren't rendering well in Emacs, and etc little problems that cropped up. I needed my email to Just Work, not be another aspect of my procrastination machi- sorry I mean, my IDE.

Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#19

Post by ubermonkey »

komali2 wrote: post #18

I was in this world for like 8 years but switched to Thunderbird after one too many emails didn't send because I missed some notification or something in mu4e, and too many emails weren't rendering well in Emacs, and etc little problems that cropped up. I needed my email to Just Work, not be another aspect of my procrastination machi- sorry I mean, my IDE.

The need for email to Just Work is one reason I've never let emacs anywhere NEAR my email flow.

Everything in emacs becomes a Project.

Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#20

Post by neonnoodle »

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 tasks or projects.

As it is, my emacs and e-mail are almost fully separated due to (I'm assuming intentional) lack of a simple method of interoperability.

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