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 nowadays. There’s a very basic render, but expect all the formatting to be wrong. I also ran into rate limits from Google because we get way too much email at work. That’s not mu4e’s fault, but just another obstacle. Can’t really have my inbox be one hour behind real time.
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 indexing new mail (and especially if you like to lug around a copy of most of your emails locally as I do). On a laptop while traveling this used to be more of a problem, but newer versions are notieably quicker and newer laptops have better battery life.
- HTML rendering isn't great. Thankfully I don't get too many important messages that isn't just plain text. This might be a reasonable use case for xwidget-webkit though I'd imagine there are security/privacy issues to work out. (Another Emacs project -- yay!)
When I started I thought it would be an efficient way to get through lots of emails, and it has been for the most part. I'm just not sure I've saved time overall unless one counts the hours configuring it as "entertainment / hobby" rather than "work".
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.
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.
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.
I'm also using Mu4e for personal email but stymied by Exchange auth for work email. I've been looking into using DavMail as an Exchange gateway, does anyone have experience with this?
I switched to mutt, started getting through my email in half the time in took me using a GUI, and never looked back.
Being able to write simple expressions to filter email, mass delete, and avoid embedded javascript are killer features. I can run all html through w3m and still have nicely rendered emails.
I still use a phone app for on the go browsing, but during work hours I have mutt open alongside neovim all day long.
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 files. I hope both things have improved since then.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 nowadays. There’s a very basic render, but expect all the formatting to be wrong. I also ran into rate limits from Google because we get way too much email at work. That’s not mu4e’s fault, but just another obstacle. Can’t really have my inbox be one hour behind real time.
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 indexing new mail (and especially if you like to lug around a copy of most of your emails locally as I do). On a laptop while traveling this used to be more of a problem, but newer versions are notieably quicker and newer laptops have better battery life.
- HTML rendering isn't great. Thankfully I don't get too many important messages that isn't just plain text. This might be a reasonable use case for xwidget-webkit though I'd imagine there are security/privacy issues to work out. (Another Emacs project -- yay!)
When I started I thought it would be an efficient way to get through lots of emails, and it has been for the most part. I'm just not sure I've saved time overall unless one counts the hours configuring it as "entertainment / hobby" rather than "work".
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.
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?
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.
I'm also using Mu4e for personal email but stymied by Exchange auth for work email. I've been looking into using DavMail as an Exchange gateway, does anyone have experience with this?
https://davmail.sourceforge.net/images/davmailArchitecture.p...
For OAUTH2, I recommend starting pizauth (https://github.com/ltratt/pizauth) as a user systemd unit.
Then you can just do (eg. in mbsync)
PassCmd "pizauth show accountname"
I switched to mutt, started getting through my email in half the time in took me using a GUI, and never looked back.
Being able to write simple expressions to filter email, mass delete, and avoid embedded javascript are killer features. I can run all html through w3m and still have nicely rendered emails.
I still use a phone app for on the go browsing, but during work hours I have mutt open alongside neovim all day long.
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 files. I hope both things have improved since then.
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.
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
My first thought was Emacs Speaks Statistics (ESS) to do this in Emacs via R, but I bet there are many alternatives.
I read eMule and got nostalgic
I read MULE and got nostalgaic for the game, then remembered the same-named thing in emacs, which made me happy that nowadays we have unicode instead.
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.
Hi, I guess you have already tried.
My Uni also made it difficult but I succeeded in setting up a working davmail, using the exchange protocol.
Mail my username at gmail.com if you think I can help.
Gateway: Exchange Protocol: O365Interactive OWA or EWS (Exchange) URL: https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx
(follow the instructions at https://davmail.sourceforge.net/faq.html)
This another similar resource with some additional stuff about using mu4e-org:
https://stuff.sigvaldason.com/email.html