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Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

Notmuch, which is IMHO superb and totally underrated.

I like it a lot due to its clever architecture. It never ever touches your email. It operates on a separate tag database.

Then, it's the task of a backend to translate tag changes into maildir actions before and after syncing email. Keeping tag to actions decoupled from the GUI is extremely clever, because it allows implementing basically any email workflow you can imagine.

For simple workflows, calling a one liner notmuch command is sufficient. You don't really need to implement anything.

Mu4e is an alternative client to Notmuch. Quite similar to Mutt. Gnus is the other big alternative. It's quite old, and complex to configure. Besides, the codebase is overcomplicated as it tries to do email in a news-like fashion. Still, it has lots of great ideas on how to deal with email from many sources. E.g. using predictive scoring.

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+1. I spent a while trying to persuade Apple Mail to let me receive notifications only for threads I was 'watching'. I never did come up with a sane answer, and finally decided "well, I use Emacs for almost everything else. Might as well see how email pans out..."

With notmuch and mbsync I have the best email setup I ever have. I wish I'd done it years ago.

Can you share your setup?

Sure. It's all available in my dotfiles and .emacs.d repos on GitHub. It's not elegant or pretty, but it has worked well for me so far.

My crontab (https://github.com/NateEag/dotfiles/blob/master/lib/.crontab) runs a check-mail script (https://github.com/NateEag/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/check-ma...) every five minutes.

The check-mail script is just a wrapper around mbsync (http://isync.sourceforge.net) that invokes 'notmuch new' after running, so notmuch can index and process new messages.

My notmuch post-new hook does a bunch of tagging for me, so I have to actually look at as little email as feasible, but the main thing it sounds like you're interested in is the notification setup:

https://github.com/NateEag/dotfiles/blob/858cabd9436d377f8fc...

With that, I can batch-process email a few times a day, while staying responsive to any discussions I actually want to be interrupted for.

The missing piece is reasonable logic for knowing when I should be notified of new threads. I'm currently in a job where people don't expect insta-responses to email, thank God, but I've been in ones where they do and I'd have to think about how to handle that more.

For reading and writing email, I just use notmuch's Emacs modes. You can see most of my interesting config here: https://github.com/NateEag/.emacs.d/blob/75d117befeaaab37cc7...

My one annoyance when reading email is that large inline images aren't auto-resized to fit. They should be, but the Emacs build I use doesn't have ImageMagick support compiled in.

My custom.el probably has some notmuch settings too.

That's the highlights. Hope it was helpful.

Would love to learn more about that, do you have a blog post or any pointers please?

I'm not sure if HN sends response notifications or if people depend on them, but just in case, I answered the sibling question here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17888628

Thanks, I'm in the process of migrating from Thunderbird to mutt/neomutt and am wondering if emacs might have advantages. I already use Emacs for Org Mode.

I'm also looking for a scriptable, text-based RSS reader: https://community.codeselfstudy.com/t/text-based-rss-atom-fe...

> am wondering if emacs might have advantages

Fresh mu/mu4e user here. The advantages over mutt/neomutt are that your e-mail now becomes the part of the same consistent UX of Emacs, and then every improvement to any of your workflows in Emacs is automatically inherited by your e-mail workflow. This depends on how much you like customizing Emacs and/or writing Emacs Lisp to solve your problems. Some practical examples include:

- org-mu4e & org-notmuch will let you link directly to your e-mail messages from your org-mode files; potentially useful if you're using org-capture to quickly add TODOs and notes.

- it's trivial to add any kind of template responses, template subresponses, etc.

- you can make Emacs automatically do things in response to particular e-mails, or you can compose/send e-mails directly from any elisp code

Emacs is a fully programmable environment with lots of existing software packages and the best interoperability story I've ever seen.

As you're already using Emacs for org-mode, you could take a look at org-feed [1] for text-based RSS. It places all RSS feeds into a normal org file with headings per source and article. As it's Emacs + org, it's naturally scriptable.

[1] https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-feed.html

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