Email in emacs

07 Jan 2014

I genuinely dislike email, yet it’s a necessary part of working and communicating these days. I suppose there is occasional value found in the community of certain mailing lists, but generally the way email is used today is simply more of a distraction or interruption.

A while back Steve Losh described how to setup Mutt the way he likes. It was an interesting read because he was detailed, technical and clearly prefers very customizable tools. I agree with him, and although I’ve long since abandonded Mutt I was motivated to describe my version of powerful, customizable, terminal based email management.

This isn’t intended to say that what I use is inherently better than the setup Steve described, it’s simply what works for me. Much of the setup is similar. I used Mutt for many years before giving Sup a try, and recently settling on the configuration I describe here. Sup is still actively developed and a great standalone mail client.

I do use Gmail and while the Gmail web interface has a great set of keybindings for most everything, they aren’t customizable so it’s a whole new set of bindings to learn. That’s not a terrible thing, but I spend most of my day in a text editor where the bindings (and subsequent muscle memory) I know are very different than those available in the Gmail web interface.

Several times in the past I’ve searched for a fast, configurable way to use emacs for accessing my email. For one reason or another the existing options were lacking in my opinion and didn’t fit my needs. However, a little over 2 years ago I stumbled across Notmuch, which is billed as a: {“fast, global search and tag based email reader to use within your text editor or in a terminal”}. This sounded like exactly what I was looking for.

It’s essentially a minimal interface to a Xapian index of your mail so powerful searching is easy, but not limited.

I also primarily use OS X so the basic design is very similar to what Steve mentions in his Overview, the difference is that I’ve removed Mutt from the picture and substitute the notmuch emacs integration.

Offlineimap and msmtp setup is essentially the same and I have two accounts configured, one personal and one for work both of which are google accounts.

Setup

If you use OS X, it’s easily available using homebrew:

brew install notmuch

And from emacs, assuming you have melpa setup, notmuch is only an M-x package-install away.

This gist has the settings I use in my emacs load-path to setup custom identities for my personal and work email accounts and configure how notmuch works.

There’s plenty of additional customization available depending on how deep the rabbit hole you choose to go. This setup has worked well for me up to this point and still allows me to use the gmail web interface in a pinch.