Mu4e

Plain-text email inside of Emacs.

Setup

Make sure the following dependencies are installed on your system before loading the module. I would recommend against using any distributions pre-packaged version of mu4e¹, and instead build it yourself which I detail in this post²:

RUN apt install -y isync libgmime-3.0-dev libxapian-dev

Setting up mbsync

The program that actually synchronizes the emails with the server is mbsync³. Create the configuration file, this is for my personal mail server⁴, which I host myself, so make sure you write your own.

IMAPStore xyz-remote
Host mail.chrishayward.xyz
User chris@chrishayward.xyz
PassCmd "pass chrishayward.xyz/chris"
SSLType IMAPS

MaildirStore xyz-local
Path ~/.cache/mail/
Inbox ~/.cache/mail/inbox
SubFolders Verbatim

Channel xyz
Master :xyz-remote:
Slave :xyz-local:
Patterns * !Archives
Create Both
Expunge Both
SyncState *

Create symbolic links

The system typically expects to find this file at $HOME/.mbsyncrc, but you may also specify a custom path if launching the command using arguments. I chose to symlink the default location to my repository.

(dotfiles/symlink "~/.emacs.d/config/mbsyncrc"
                  "~/.mbsyncrc")

This repository also contains my personal encrypted auth info, this is required by mbsync³ to sign all of the outbound messages.

(dotfiles/symlink "~/.emacs.d/config/authinfo.gpg"
                  "~/.authinfo.gpg")

First time indexing

Before you can use mu4e¹ inside of Emacs, you need to synchronize the mail database, and index it using mu⁵, the library used by mu4e¹ under the hood. Execute these commands in your terminal before loading the module, after that you can do everything inside of Emacs:

RUN mbsync -a
RUN mu init --maildir="~/.cache/mail" --my-address="chris@chrishayward.xyz"
RUN mu index

Config

After syncing and indexing, the mail is ready for Emacs. Include mu4e¹ in the configuration by adding the custom built version to the load path, and configure the mail account.

Update every 5 minutes
Configure mail account(s)
Scale text for all devices
Sign outbound mail with GPG key

(use-package mu4e
  :load-path "~/.local/source/mu/mu4e/"
  :custom (mu4e-maildir "~/.cache/mail")
          (mu4e-update-interval (* 5 60))
          (mu4e-get-mail-command "mbsync -a")
          (mu4e-compose-format-flowed t)
          (mu4e-change-filenames-when-moving t)
          (message-send-mail-function 'smtpmail-send-it)  
          (mml-secure-openpgp-signers '("37AB1CB72B741E478CA026D43025DCBD46F81C0F"))
          (mu4e-compose-signature (concat "Chris Hayward\n"
                                          "https://chrishayward.xyz\n"))
  :config
  (add-hook 'message-send-hook 'mml-secure-message-sign-pgpmime)
  (setq mu4e-contexts
    (list
      ;; Main
      ;; chris@chrishayward.xyz
      (make-mu4e-context
        :name "Main"
        :match-func
          (lambda (msg)
            (when msg 
              (string-prefix-p "/Main" (mu4e-message-field msg :maildir))))
        :vars
          '((user-full-name . "Christopher James Hayward")
            (user-mail-address . "chris@chrishayward.xyz")
            (smtpmail-smtp-server . "mail.chrishayward.xyz")
            (smtpmail-smtp-service . 587)
            (smtpmail-stream-type . starttls))))))

Desktop notifications

Receive desktop notifications when new mail arrives with the mu4e-alert⁶ package.

(use-package mu4e-alert
 :after mu4e
 :custom (mu4e-alert-set-default-style 'libnotify)
 :config (mu4e-alert-enable-notifications)
         (mu4e-alert-enable-mode-line-display))

Shortcuts

Open the mu4e¹ dashboard with SPC m.

(dotfiles/leader
 "m" '(mu4e :which-key "Mu4e"))

Footnotes

https://emacswiki.org/emacs/mu4e

https://chrishayward.xyz/posts/installing-mu-mu4e-from-source/

https://isync.sourceforge.io

⁴

mailto:chris@chrishayward.xyz

⁵

https://codewith.mu/en/download

⁶

https://github.com/iqbalansari/mu4e-alert

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