Email is an integral part of our everyday life. I have spent a large amount of time trying to experiment with different email clients available on Linux. I have tried Thunderbird, Evolution, notmuch with emacs, mutt, mu4e.
Since I am a Linux user, the list above includes only the clients compatible with Linux, particularly Debian/Ubuntu ecosystem. You can classify most of the email clients in two broad workflow categories
- Folder based workflow - This kind of workflow means you have separate folders for all the kinds of emails you receive. It could be separate email accounts each with their own sub-folders. You keep on top of your emails and mostly look frequently at the emails on the top in each folder. Thunderbird, Evolution, Gmail Web is an example of such kind.
- Search based - This kind of workflow is completely based on what you want to see. It usually doesn’t have a concept of folders at all. You work with tags and an indexer. Email indexers like mu and notmuch are what powers this. All emails are indexed and tagged so that you can find the email you are looking for very easily. If you are a terminal person or the one who loves keyboard more than mouse/trackpad (like me!), then you will fall in love with this workflow (like me!).
Thunderbird is like my fall-back email client. Usually, I always have a working thunderbird setup on my laptop, even when I am using something else. This is because I like to play around with different setups and often screw up loosing everything in my maildir. Also, sometimes, I have small holes in my knowledge of the workflow to achieve specific things (mostly, keybindings ;-). A very important and absolutely necessary plugin is Enigmail. It powers the integration of gpg in thunderbird, which I feel should be baked in all modern email clients.
Notmuch and mu are, as I have mentioned before, email indexers. Both of them are really good and really fast. If you have ever searched anything in thunderbird/evolution/outlook, you will be amazed at how fast they are.
My current setup involves four major componenets. Offlineimap to fetch email, notmuch to index email, Astroid to view/search/read/write emails and msmtp to send emails.
First, offlineimap fetches all my email from different email servers using IMAP protocol. It is written in python. The maintainer for this project has moved on to writing a more robust and new imap framework called imapfw. But offlineimap still remains the best and easiest way to sync emails between two different maildirs. Here is a copy of my .offlineimaprc , the configuration for offlineimap using Gmail.
[general]
accounts = Gmail
pythonfile = ~/.offlineimap.py
[Account Gmail]
localrepository = GmailLocal
remoterepository = GmailRemote
maxage = 100
[Repository GmailLocal]
type = Maildir
localfolders = ~/.maildir/Gmail/
[Repository GmailRemote]
type = Gmail
sslcacertfile = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
remoteuser = [email protected]
realdelete = no
createfolders = false
remotepasseval = get_password_emacs("imap.gmail.com",
"[email protected]",
"993")
folderfilter = lambda foldername: foldername not in ['[Gmail]/All Mail',
'[Gmail]/Trash', '[Gmail]/Bin',
'[Gmail]/Sent Mail', '[Gmail]/Starred',
'[Gmail]/Spam','SPAM' ]
holdconnectionopen = true
keepalive = 60
The above settings required a python script to fetch the password ~/.offlineimap.py :
#!/usr/bin/python
import re, os
def get_password_emacs(machine, login, port):
s = "machine %s login %s port %s password ([^ ]*)\n" % (machine, login, port)
p = re.compile(s)
authinfo = os.popen("gpg -q --no-tty -d ~/.authinfo.gpg").read()
return p.search(authinfo).group(1)
The above script fetches the password for your account from the encrypted file .authinfo.gpg which when decrypted looks like this:
machine imap.gmail.com login [email protected] port 993 password mypassword
machine smtp.gmail.com login [email protected] port 587 password mypassword
To create the encrypted file, you put the above two lines in a file called .authinfo and then encrypt it using gpg using:
$ gpg --output .authinfo.gpg --encrypt --recipient [email protected] .authinfo
You will also want to have gpg-agent setup so that gpg doesn’t prompt you for your passphrase every time it wants to check your email.
So, after this, now you have a working setup for fetching email. To test that you can fetch your emails try:
$ offlineimap --dry-run
Next, we move on to notmuch. You can install it on Debian/Ubuntu systems using:
$ sudo apt-get install notmuch
Here is a simple configuration for notmuch, stored at ~/.notmuch-config
# .notmuch-config - Configuration file for the notmuch mail system
#
# For more information about notmuch, see http://notmuchmail.org
[database]
path=~/.maildir
[user]
name=Abhilash Raj
[email protected]
# If you have mutiple accuonts, uncomment the line below.
# [email protected]
[new]
tags=unread;new;
ignore=
[search]
exclude_tags=deleted;spam;
[maildir]
synchronize_flags=true
[crypto]
gpg_path=gpg2
After you have this, try notmuch new command. It will index all your emails and tag them with rules that you have defined above. If everything went like expected, you should see an output like below if you run notmuch without any arguments.
$ notmuch
Notmuch is configured and appears to have a database. Excellent!
At this point you can start exploring the functionality of notmuch by
using commands such as:
notmuch search tag:inbox
notmuch search to:"Your Name"
notmuch search from:"[email protected]"
notmuch search subject:"my favorite things"
See "notmuch help search" for more details.
You can also use "notmuch show" with any of the thread IDs resulting
from a search. Finally, you may want to explore using a more sophisticated
interface to notmuch such as the emacs interface implemented in notmuch.el
or any other interface described at https://notmuchmail.org
And don't forget to run "notmuch new" whenever new mail arrives.
Have fun, and may your inbox never have much mail.
Notmuch is used by several different email clients. You can test and try which ones you like the best. There is an emacs client so that you don’t ever have to leave emacs for your email. I tried it for a little while but just didn’t feel the best to me.
Last week I stumbled upon another frontend to notmuch called Astroid. It is a sleek interface written in C++ and renders emails using webkit. You write emails in your favorite text editor that can be spawn off or embeded inside of Astroid. I have embeded emacs in Astroid which is super freaking awesome!
I compiled and installed Astroid from the source that you can find on Github. The installation instructions are provided in the Readme. A default configuration is generated at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/astroid/config (most commonly at ~/.config/astroid/config/)the first time you run astroid. Configuring astroid is super easy. You can view all the default keybindings by ? key in the default view. It also has a very nice wiki that can help you setup configure Astroid to your taste.
Astroid uses a script called poll.sh at ~/.config/astroid/poll.sh to fetch your email if you want. You can write your own commands in the script which can do several other things than just fetching email, like indexing new emails, notifying you of new emails etc. Here is what mys script looks like:
#! /bin/bash
if ! ping -w 1 -W 1 -c 1 mail.google.com; then
echo "there is no internet connection"
exit
fi
echo "Checking new mail!"
/usr/bin/offlineimap
NEW_MAIL=false
if ! (notmuch new | grep "No new mail."); then
NEW_MAIL=true
fi
# Tag email etc. here
notmuch tag --batch <<EOF
+urgent tag:new and subject:URGENT
+inbox tag:new and folder:Gmail/INBOX
+work tag:new and from:github or from:gitlab
+promo tag:new and folder:Gmail/Promotions
+social tag:new and folder:Gmail/Social
-new tag:new
EOF
notmuch tag -inbox tag:promo or tag:social
if [ $NEW_MAIL = true ]; then
notify-send "New mail."
fi
The most important part of the script that you should change is the part starting with notmuch tag --batch . This is how notmuch tags all your emails based on some pre-defined rules. All the new emails are tagged with new and unread by default and then the rest of the processing can happen on the emails that have new tag.
Notmuch’s documentation mentions different ways in which you can tag your emails as they arrive. There are several different ways and you can choose whatever works the best for you. I encourage you to dive more into tagging and different robust ways to tag emails as this is going to be the central piece of your workflow. If you are smart, you will be able to automate a large part of filtering process and increase your productivity to a very high level. It is very easy to write scripts that can classify your emails to into certain categories based on the headers or content of the email. If you want to get all your Gmail tags in notmuch, you can do this:
$ notmuch tag +tag-name folder:Gmail/tag-name
Since gmail’s tags are essentially treated as folders by offlineimap (and hence notmuch), you can very easily tag them using folder: search query in notmuch. There are other more advanced ways to search in notmuch.
The final thing that you want to setup is how emails are sent. By default, Astroid doesn’t have any inbuilt mechanism to relay emails. It recommends using msmtp for sending emails, although you don’t have to. Any smtp software that has a sendmail like interface should work. Here is my configuration for msmtp stored in ~/.msmtprc :
defaults
port 587
tls on
auth on
logfile ~/.msmtp.log
tls_trust_file /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
account gmail
host smtp.gmail.com
from [email protected]
user [email protected]
tls_starttls on
tls on
auth on
port 587
passwordeval gpg2 --no-tty -q -d ~/.msmtp-gmail.gpg
Your gmail password is supposed to be stored encrypted in ~/.msmtp-gmail.gpg file. There are other ways that you can provide your password to msmtp, have a look at the example configuration in the documentation.
Hope you have fun with emails!