EmacsWiki: mu4e (original) (raw)

mu4e is an email client for Emacs. It’s based on the mu email indexer/searcher.

It's not information overload. It's filter failure. --Prof. Shirky

mu4e’s mission is to be a better filter.

mu4e first appeared in mu 0.9.8.

Features

Fully search-based: there are no folders, only queries
Fully documented, with example configurations
User-interface optimized for speed, with quick key strokes for common actions
Asynchronous; heavy actions don’t block emacs
Support for non-English languages (“angstrom” will match “Ångström”)
Support for signing and encryption
Address auto-completion based on your existing messages
Extensible with your own code and many already done snippets

Quickstart

This tutorial assumes you have use a tool such as mbsync or mpop to retrieve your mail into a maildir folder called ~/mail.

Download mu from your package manager, then, from the commandline, run:

mu init --maildir=~/mail --my-address=me@example.com

From Emacs, download Mu4e with M-x package-install RET mu4e RET and run it with M-x mu4e.

Press U to update Mu4e’s mail listing, and bu to see all your new mail or j to jump to a maildir folder.

Tips

Context templates

Defining mu4e contexts for multiple email accounts:

(defun my-make-mu4e-context (context-name full-name mail-address signature) "Return a mu4e context named CONTEXT-NAME with :match-func matching folder name CONTEXT-NAME in Maildir. The context's user-mail-address', user-full-name' and `mu4e-compose-signature' is set to MAIL-ADDRESS FULL-NAME and SIGNATURE respectively. Special folders are set to context specific folders." (let ((dir-name (concat "/" context-name))) (make-mu4e-context :name context-name

   :match-func
   `(lambda (msg)
      (when msg
        (string-match-p
     ,(concat "^" dir-name)
     (mu4e-message-field msg :maildir))))
   :vars
   `((user-mail-address    . ,mail-address)
     (user-full-name       . ,full-name)
     (mu4e-sent-folder     . ,(concat dir-name "/Sent"))
     (mu4e-drafts-folder   . ,(concat dir-name "/Drafts"))
     (mu4e-trash-folder    . ,(concat dir-name "/Trash"))
     (mu4e-refile-folder   . ,(concat dir-name "/Archive"))
     (mu4e-compose-signature . ,signature)))))

(setq mu4e-change-filenames-when-moving t)

You can then set an account:

(setq mu4e-contexts `(,(my-make-mu4e-context "account0" "john" "john@example.org" "emacs")))

Integrating with mbsync

I use mu4e with mbsync (and GMail). Since it takes a while, mbsync runs in a cron job every 10 minutes or so, which mostly works (and I don’t want mu4e to wait for a sync). However, sometimes I want to refresh my emails now (“Hey, I just sent you something…”). This code changes the meaning of the prefix argument to “U” so that it re-syncs when given a prefix and doesn’t otherwise.