Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e(eamonnsullivan.co.uk) |
Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e(eamonnsullivan.co.uk) |
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.
Then you can just do (eg. in mbsync)
PassCmd "pizauth show accountname"
Everything in emacs becomes a Project.
Another benefit is that using standard mailbox formats and separate tools allows you to configure, replace, and integrate any part of the setup. With traditional clients you're locked into whatever they support and allow you to configure.
https://davmail.sourceforge.net/images/davmailArchitecture.p...
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.
[0]: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Sea...
[1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Sea...
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.
Has anyone figured out a solution to keep this value updated? One issue is that I'm never sure when the new TLS certificate has rolled out.
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.
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)
though I tend to stick with org
Authorize once in a web dashboard, then use your accounts as if they didn’t need OAuth (ie. normal IMAP, POP3 or SMTP).
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".
Also, the real test would have been my much more voluminous work email!
The HTML rendering isn't great, as you said, but you are two keystrokes from opening that email in a browser, if you have to.
And I have tweaked the config several times now, but I think that's mostly because I'm changing my (and the charity's) email, which involves a lot of shuffling about. Again, in six months, I'll have another look and decide whether it _really_ helped.
I've not seen the other things you mentioned. I only check for email every 10 minutes, but opening and (especially) searching for emails seem much faster than doing it in Gmail. Plus, I can do searches across email accounts, like all unreads across all three accounts. That was definitely slower in the online clients.
Finally, there's a quick ('a' then 'v') way to just open a message in a browser if the HTML is too thick.
Why not? Does your job mandate that you watch your inbox constantly, and respond immediately to all messages? How do you get anything else done?
This is the reason I haven't tried all the email tools that seem fun to play with, but not worth it :/
And the search.... fantastic. Best email search and virtual folder capability I've used on any platform.
Basically DavMail connects to outlook at creates a local smtp and imap server which I connect to with mbsyc and msmtp. Mu indexes these emails from the local server created by DavMail, and Mu4e displays them and sends them with that local server as well. Once you have DavMail setup you can basically follow any standard mu/mutt/msmtp/mbsync tutorial, just use localhost and the ports exposed by DavMail.
Getting DavMail setup can be the tricky part, I remember having a lot of trouble, but I think it was related to the fact that the config I was editing wasn't being picked up systemd service that was controlling DavMail. The best advice I can give you is experiment with different authentication modes (davmail.mode in the config) and try sending mail to the DavMail server in an attempt to trigger it to do the authentication workflow.
In the end, set davmail.mode=O365Manual and davmail.url=https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx Upon attempting to send an email from mu4e it opened up a browser to do a microsoft authentication, and then I believe it saved a token in my config file (variable davmail.oauth.<your email>.refreshToken) which has been handling authentication without issue for the past few months.
Some miscellaneous notes. First, this may have been harder for me as it was not possible for me to use the DavMail GUI which might make the authentication workflow easier. I also have two email username@organization and first.last@organization. I have all of my davmail,msmtp, and mbsync configurations using username@organization, My mu4e config references the username@organization maildir folders, but my user-mail-address variable is first.last@organization and that is what recipients see (although mu complains about not knowing about the first.last account). Lastly, this DavMail setup isn't mu4e specific, I initially used it with mutt, and it worked for that as well.
I hope this is helpful, if there's interest I can try to go through the setup from the beginning and create a more in depth tutorial. I wish Microsoft did not make this such a pain, and I wonder if DavMail's days of effectiveness will soon be over...
Edit: they (my Uni) made offlineimap unusable, but it works with davmail.
In my previous org I could also use offlineimap and msmtp to connect to their Microsoft mail server via standard protocols. But in this org I’ve so far tried the built-in Exchange support in Thunderbird as well as in Evolution Data Server based exchange clients (Evolution and KMail). All of them manage to connect to the server, kinda, but then I get an error message saying basically that my mail client is not approved and I’ll have to contact my admin to use it.
EDIT: I might add that the IT deliberately blocked non-Outlook mail clients a year ago or so, other Linux users told me that it worked fine before that. It’s supposedly a crackdown on people using shady third-party apps that they are concerned might exfiltrate data, but somehow they don’t allow exceptions even for reputable clients like Thunderbird.
And I never had to hack anything together.
Wikipedia lists many UI and functionality changes over the years for the Mail app.[1] As recently as this year, people are upset about changes in the Mail app in recent versions.[2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Mail
[2]: https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/get-old-apple-mail-back-ios...
Has the interface in Mail evolved since the early 2000s? Yes.
Does that constitute a material change, or even an adjustment, on my part? No.
Did I ever have to hack anything together to make this happen so smoothly for so long? Also no. ;)
