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Comment by preek | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, I went the other way. I used to have mutt for years, then went through a dark phase (macOS Mail.app, Evernote and Things) and finally concluded to Emacs with mu4e.

Integrating mail with Emacs was the best idea ever, because Emails include either todos or serve as reference in projects. Creating todos from Mails as well as linking to them from org-mode is only a shortcut away.

I have never had a more easy to manage and productive todo management system - and it's all text, so there will never be breaking changes or paid upgrades or incompatibilities between tools that I cannot fix.

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I have also been using an emacs (spacemacs) + org + mu4e setup for 6 months or so. Unfortunately, everything seems to be really buggy and break at random moments. Also, there isn't a really good iOS integration story.

So, I am slowly retracting and going back to vim, Mail.app, Things (and mutt every now and then ;)).

Well, you're using spacemacs. I know it's super popular, but it's also a huuge configuration which changes defaults. So updating will always be a little dangerous.

I'm not trying to be mean, it's a great project, of course.

I have my own configuration on top of vanilla Emacs and have never had any problems with things stopping to work.

As for iOS I don't need more than what MobileOrg has. I need to add new todos and very seldom look stuff up. Both work totally fine. And I'm saying this after having been a paying Evernote and Things user for years^^

Do you use GMail? If so, how much pain is was to configure your setup to connect to it reliably? And handle multiple e-mail accounts?

I ask, because in the past I toyed with switching to using Emacs as my e-mail client, but aways got stuck on configuring the whole setup to work reliably and seamlessly.

I use Emacs + mu4e with 2 GMail accounts (personal & work). AMA I guess.

I use OfflineIMAP to sync the two accounts to ~/Maildir/{work,personal}, then mu4e-context to switch between settings for the two.

I entirely outsource actually sending the mail to a local exim4 daemon which is configured to forward through a GMail smarthost. IMNSHO this is much better than the recommended default configuration of making Emacs actually send the mail, I don't have to worry about not having a network connection at the time, or some other transitory error with a real smtpd retrying the send if needed.

You then may need a tiny hack on top of Debian's default exim configuration to make it switch between different smtp servers / accounts depending on what address you're sending mail from. For reasons I won't go into I send E-Mail through a company-run SMTP server even though I then fetch work E-Mail from GMail.

1. https://wiki.debian.org/GmailAndExim4

Thanks for the tips. I'm trying OfflineIMAP now (it's syncing... there's few gigs of e-mail to sync...).

I'll definitely consider your trick for sending e-mail - I definitely value both Emacs not hanging and also having the ability to send e-mails off-line.

One trouble I had while configuring for my gmail account was the lacking support for Google's XOAUTH extension for SMTP and IMAP authentication. After a little research, I found that you can create app passwords[0] in Google after you've activated 2FA. This allowed me to use standard PLAIN authentication with passwords that don't allow for management of the whole google account.

[0] - https://myaccount.google.com/apppasswords

Yeah, I just bounced off that when trying out OfflineIMAP; thanks, setting a new app password helped.

OP here. I'm not using Gmail (anymore), but not because it was hard to set up(;

I'm using Mu4e with 4 different mail accounts, though and it's completely seamless and easy to compose.

If you're interested, you can check out my configuration (which is written in literate org-mode so it's actually easy to read^^): https://github.com/munen/emacs.d/blob/master/configuration.o...

Thanks for the config. I'll be getting to setting up mu4e after the OfflineIMAP sync finishes (some time this week, hopefully ;)).

How's your experience with literate config, in terms of managing it? I've been meaning to switch from my mess of individual files to something like this for a time now.

I'm using offlineimap, too. It's not running longer than a program like Mail.app when it has been synched once. The first run, of course, might take a while if you have lots of mails(;

Regarding literate configuration: It's been super easy, honestly. I used to have a longer init.el (formerly super long vim.rc^^). Once I wrote a short macro that converted comments into new headings in org to get me started. Then, every time I touch something, I just add a little more documentation to guide me and others for the next time. It's not more work than writing a regular init.el with comments, but the result is so much more powerful (folding->refactoring, documentation on Github, etc).

Can only recommend it, at least for Elisp.

for me the only thing that i found that worked is Zero Inbox. i get a lot e-mail per day, most of them are not actionable ( notifications, statuses, replays for other departments and so on ) i archive them, and the ones that i have to handle are moved to wunderlist or replayed right away.

this is the only solution that i found to work for me. I know that i have to handle it now inside wunderlist. but it works ok for me because is better sorted.

i use evernote for some of the stuff, and i try to write everything. sure its not ideal but it is a lot better then it used to be where i would forget about some important stuff.

I did the same! With Things instead of Wunderlist.

But my links to mail from Things and EN kept breaking. I also work with Inbox Zero and that's the primary reason for my switch - without references it got worthless.

I use Emacs (with Spacemacs) + Notmuch with mbsync to pull in new mail and msmtp for sending mail. It works pretty well and it's easy to find old messages, which is the sort of thing I need the most from my email.

There are lots of these around, but if you're interested in trying it out I have a pretty simple Spacemacs layer for Notmuch as well.

https://github.com/cmiles74/spacemacs-notmuch-layer

Same here. I am a long time mutt user, but recently switched to gnus. Have you considered gnus instead of mu4e? Gnus is notoriously hard to set up, but I found it has some remarkable features.

> Gnus is notoriously hard to set up, but I found it has some remarkable features.

Maybe things have changed now, but several years ago I wanted to setup Gnus, and asked for help on IRC (#emacs IIRC) because there weren't many good resources online. The response was "if you need to ask for help, then Gnus isn't for you."

Well if you need to ask basic things that means you haven't read the manual, which can easily get you going with a relatively fancy setup. People naturally don't like explaining things that are already explained in a manual that's a C-h I away, hyperlinked and friendly. Emacs is one of the few projects that have good docs, and probably the best among them wrt the accessibility and ease of use of the manual. And still some people hate on Info, probably because they don't read/write documentation at all...

Honestly, that's probably true. Not in some elitist, "if you have to ask, you're not smart enough" kind of way, but in a "if you have to ask, then you're the kind of person for whom figuring out how to set up an esoteric email program isn't fun, and you're not going to like it much here" kind of way.

Gnus is fairly painful to set up. I did write something up several years ago about getting it going the way I wanted (http://www.cataclysmicmutation.com/2010/11/multiple-gmail-ac...). I haven't used Gnus for a few years now, having first gone to mu4e and now due to corporate fun, Microsoft Outlook, so that document may or may not be currently useful.

Not OP but the best email client in Emacs is RMAIL. So dead simple that you can teach it to your grandpa in a couple hours. I use Gnus because it does nntp thus helping me keep my inbox clean while still being able to follow many mailing lists. Also, many times people don't CC you when responding on lists so if you don't gmane+nntp, many times you don't get the responses without subscribing. I wonder what weird programs these use.

I did look into Gnus and saw some amazing features there.

However, mu4e is pretty straight forward and has a strong search engine included which means that I can use my setup on both Linux and the Mac. As I understand, I would need to set up a local mail server for Gnus if I wanted reasonably fast search. Having multiple (and sometimes changing) mail accounts that I would need to configure on multiple OSs kept me from doing that.

So to me, mu4e is easier, though Gnus might be simpler in the true sense of the word.

Not saying that Gnus doesn't have merit, though. It's a fascinating piece of engineering. And when I get older (already old^^), and only have one business running in parallel and no more need for the Mac, I'll probably switch(;

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