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by bergheim 1593 days ago
I was just like you. Until a few months ago.

I have had mu4e set up for about a year, but I didn't feel comfortable in it, often reverting to the web clients instead, which was miserable. Recently I spent (many) hours making it really my own, and _my god_ what an amazing experience!

I have all my accounts in the same view (if I want). I have filters for everything. I can say "follow up" with 2 keystrokes, which will open up a calendar, allow me to pick a date, then the email will be automatically archived and I will not see anything about it until that date in my org-agenda. I use org-msg to compose these Outlook-style email for work (except I can easily quote, post syntax highlighted code, even with the real results embeded, etc).

I have 2-letter shortcuts to quickly cut down to the sender domain, the email FROM: address, everything from this address sent only to me, a filter for finding everything that looks like this subject.. I even have 2 letter shortcuts to fire up a browser with this Message-ID and open it (dynamic based on account) directly in the webclient (unless you are MS [1] who for some reason uses POST for their searches. I hack around it by adding a precise query to my clipboard). I don't often use this, but it can be handy.

This is all synced using isync. I have two systemd unit files. One which does the inbox-related stuff often, and another full sync which runs every hour if I recall correctly.

Finally, since this is all locally, search is instant. And since it is in emacs, I use all my normal shortcuts and everything.

I have finally been able to achieve inbox zero, something I never have before.

It took a lot of effort to get here, but I love it. Something really amazing would have to come along to displace my workflow, and I don't see that happening. notmuch is another option, which has tags support (mu4e does not). That is the only thing I miss in mu4e. However notmuch stores the tags in a local database which is not easily shared, so for now I am super happy with mu4e. And I often capture the email in org-mode anyway, which does support tags.

Most of the config for this in on github [2] (I still have some things to commit), if you are interested.

Waiting for tags to be stored in X-headers of the email reliably..

[1]: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/outlk_...

[2]: https://github.com/bergheim/dotfiles/blob/3cb1540f57f391beb2...

1 comments

Can you recommend a good set of docs and tutorials to set up mu4e?

I still use emacs and a separate (mutt) MUA and copy and paste things between, I know it sounds awful... but hard to escape entrenched habits.

What would you suggest as the best steps for a good setup? Does everything go in the .emacs config? Do you need to write much e-lisp or it it a tickbox type config?

Thanks for any pointers!

They are a bit all over the place - I started this years ago so I don't really have anything solid, but searching gives a few results that looks pretty solid ([1] [2]). If you temporarily tried doom [3], I think you could see how it would work for you. You need to install something like isync as well so you have a mailbox index locally. I would start with just one account - multiple accounts is a bit more effort.

In general, be prepared to spend some time getting this to work. I wrote a bunch of elisp, but you don't have to write much. For me it was worth it, but this is not a plug-and-play solution unfortunately (nor is notmuch).

[1]: https://jherrlin.github.io/posts/emacs-mu4e/

[2]: http://cachestocaches.com/2017/3/complete-guide-email-emacs-...

[3]: https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs/blob/master/modules/e...

Thank you. After I posted I realised my stupidity in not checking out your linked config file. Having fun with that now. Cheers for the additional nfo.