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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

#41

Post by eamonnsullivan »

kkylin wrote: post #26
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…

I too am a bit surprised this made it on the front page. Mu4e is definitely niche, and I wouldn't crow about it like I do org or magit. I've only been using it for less than a month and it will be a while before I know whether it is a net win.

Also, the real test would have been my much more voluminous work email!

The HTML rendering isn't great, as you said, but you are two keystrokes from opening that email in a browser, if you have to.

And I have tweaked the config several times now, but I think that's mostly because I'm changing my (and the charity's) email, which involves a lot of shuffling about. Again, in six months, I'll have another look and decide whether it _really_ helped.

Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#42

Post by anthk »

finaard wrote: post #16
smartmic wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Gnus still sucks. It might improved on IMAP, but with NNTP it's 100x slower than SLRN, even if gnus reuses the SLRN spool.

Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#43

Post by pfortuny »

SoftTalker wrote: post #38
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…

> Can’t really have my inbox be one hour behind real time. Why not? Does your job mandate that you watch your inbox constantly, and respond immediately to all messages? How do you get anything else done?

My mail gets updated every 3mins... ?

Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#44

Post by setopt »

pfortuny wrote: post #33
setopt wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 T…

I am surprised as davmail with the Exchange protocol has worked for me since I set it up. They made offlineimap unusable but davmail works (it even has a small web client for the login when more than a month has passed). ?? Edit: they (my Uni) made offlineimap unusable, but it works with davmail.

I actually haven’t tried DavMail (but have heard about it), so if it manages to get around this sort of shenanigans I’ll happily give that a shot.

In my previous org I could also use offlineimap and msmtp to connect to their Microsoft mail server via standard protocols. But in this org I’ve so far tried the built-in Exchange support in Thunderbird as well as in Evolution Data Server based exchange clients (Evolution and KMail). All of them manage to connect to the server, kinda, but then I get an error message saying basically that my mail client is not approved and I’ll have to contact my admin to use it.

EDIT: I might add that the IT deliberately blocked non-Outlook mail clients a year ago or so, other Linux users told me that it worked fine before that. It’s supposedly a crackdown on people using shady third-party apps that they are concerned might exfiltrate data, but somehow they don’t allow exceptions even for reputable clients like Thunderbird.

Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#45

Post by heintje_ghulam »

I use offlineimap3 (https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap3) to download email that I then read with mu4e. To make it work with my email provider I need to place a cert_fingerprint value in the .offlineimaprc configuration file. This used to change once a year, but now the value changes every 47 days (https://www.digicert.com/blog/tls-certificate-lifetimes-will...).

Has anyone figured out a solution to keep this value updated? One issue is that I'm never sure when the new TLS certificate has rolled out.

Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#46

Post by pfortuny »

setopt wrote: post #44
pfortuny wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am surprised as davmail with the Exchange protocol has worked for me since I set it up. They made offlineimap unusable but davmail works (it even has a small web client for the login when more than a month has passed). ?? Edit: they (my Uni) made offlineimap unusable, but it works with davmail.

I actually haven’t tried DavMail (but have heard about it), so if it manages to get around this sort of shenanigans I’ll happily give that a shot. In my previous org I could also use offlineimap and msmtp to connect to their Microsoft mail server via standard protocols. But in this org I’ve so far tried the built-in Exchange support in Thunderbird as well as in Evolution Data Server based exchange clients (Evolution…

You are repeating the very same history and excuses (from the IT Dpt.) I lived and heard. Davmail works for me on Linux and MacOS even from outside the intranet. Give it a try and I would be happy to help, I have a gmail account with my nick.

Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#47

Post by pfortuny »

pfortuny wrote: post #46
setopt wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually haven’t tried DavMail (but have heard about it), so if it manages to get around this sort of shenanigans I’ll happily give that a shot. In my previous org I could also use offlineimap and msmtp to connect to their Microsoft mail server via standard protocols. But in this org I’ve so far tried the built-in Exchange support in Thunderbird as well as in Evolution Data Server based exchange clients (Evolution…

You are repeating the very same history and excuses (from the IT Dpt.) I lived and heard. Davmail works for me on Linux and MacOS even from outside the intranet. Give it a try and I would be happy to help, I have a gmail account with my nick.

Edit: night time here now, sorry if I cannot help right away.

Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#48

Post by mediumsmart »

SoftTalker wrote: post #32
dietr1ch wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 :/

I use notmuch for email in emacs. I use w3m to process HTML emails for viewing in text, it does a pretty good job especially with tables, which are still used a lot in HTML email. And the search.... fantastic. Best email search and virtual folder capability I've used on any platform.

I'll try that w3m viewer - good idea. I used to be on rmail but then decided to take a step back to mh-e

Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#49

Post by floathub »

antoine-levitt wrote: post #23
gloghmalogh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This may help, it has an example pizauth config (scroll down to "Authenticating with pass and pizauth"):

https://stuff.sigvaldason.com/email.html

Re: Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e

#50

Post by brendyn »

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.

Is it possible to get the authentication done without running their proprietary JavaScript login page?
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