Emails in emacs (1/4)
e-mails on Emacs: #1 - #2 - #3 -#4
In this series of posts, I write about two emacs email clients, gnus12 and mu4e3, using two approaches:
- IMAP (in-memory)
gnus - Downloading emails to a folder
~/Maildir
The search engine, mu, and the emacs package mu4e deals with the 2nd approach. gnus can work with both approaches.
My usage: If I am just checking for emails, and deciding what to do them, I use gnus with the 1st approach. If I am filtering a large number of emails to do some classifications or bulk-actions, I use mu4e with the 2nd approach.
gnus is somewhat hard to set up if you’re gonna rely on the documentation. This is why I created this post.
mu4e is easier to set up. First use mbsync download the emails to a folder, then initialize some variables for mu4e in ~/.emacs, as described here and you’re set. In this approach, you have a folder synchronized to the email, and you do everything with a search. The program mu indexes your local email folder, so it is faster than doing things on the web because it is a local folder.
I used this approach to clean up my over +1000 unread emails, then went back to using gnus to read emails as news, expiring articles and “ticking” only what needs to be ticked. Btw you can search your IMAP groups in gnus using the your email providers search with command G G in the *group* buffer.