reading gmail mails with emacs

Intro

mu is a tool for dealing with e-mail messages stored in the Maildir-format, on Unix-like systems. mu’s main purpose is to help you to find the messages you need, quickly; in addition, it allows you to view messages, extract attachments

mu

Prerequisites

• Emacs
• emacs-lisp
• Being comfortable with command line
• Curiosity to try

G-Mail gives a nice intuitive UI for interacting with mail. There are lots of disadvantages with it.

• Connection to internet
• Bloated, there are too many options.
• Heavy, Every page load on an average transfers ~25MB
• Limited search capabilities,

Gmail settings

Enable IMAP

⚙️ > See all settings > Forwarding and POP/Imap

In IMAP section, Enable IMAP if not enabled.Set Auto Expunge off , Move to trash and save changes. Next up is password, There are 2 ways to go about it depending on 2-Factor authentication status. If 2-Factor is not enabled, then Less Secure App must be enabled. For accounts with 2-Factor enabled, create an App password if you don’t have one.

Installation and Setup

Install

Instructions here will vary from distro to distro.

sudo apt install isync

Set Up

Create a file in home directory .mbsyncrc with content below. replace <EMAIL> with your email and <PASSWORD> with your password accordingly.

Having password in plain text is a bad idea if you are on a public machine, even on personal computer. You can use gpg to encrypt password or use password store provided by your distribution.

IMAPAccount account-1
Host imap.gmail.com
User <EMAIL>
Pass "<PASSWORD>"
#AuthMechs LOGIN
SSLType IMAPS
CertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt

IMAPStore account-1-remote
Account account-1

MaildirStore account-1-local
Subfolders Verbatim
Path ~/.local/share/mail/<EMAIL>/
Inbox ~/.local/share/mail/<EMAIL>/INBOX
#Flatten .

Channel account-1
#Expunge Both
Master :account-1-remote:
Slave :account-1-local:
Patterns * ![Gmail]* "[Gmail]/Sent Mail" "[Gmail]/Starred" "[Gmail]/All Mail"
Create Both
SyncState *
MaxMessages 0
ExpireUnread no

mbsync will throw an error if path is not created. Create directories with the command below

mkdir -p $HOME/.local/share/mail/<EMAIL>/

Next up syncing mails. For testing purposes, first time do this from terminal. It may take some time to complete if you have lots of mails.

mbsync -a

Now, We have all the mails in on machine in a local folder. We have to tell mu to index our mails.

For mu older than v1.3.8

mu index --maildir=~/.local/share/mail/<EMAIL>/ --my-address=<EMAIL>

Newer mu version,

mu init --maildir=~/.local/share/mail/<EMAIL>/ --my-address=<EMAIL>;
mu index

Final step, Configure mu4e to read emails. Add the below confurations to init.el

(use-package mu4e
  :ensure nil
  :config
  (setq mu4e-change-filenames-when-moving t
        mu4e-update-interval 900 ;; seconds
        mu4e-get-mail-command "mbsync -a"
        mu4e-maildir "~/.local/share/mail"
        mu4e-drafts-folder "/[Gmail]/Drafts"
        mu4e-sent-folder   "/[Gmail]/Sent Mail"
        mu4e-refile-folder "/[Gmail]/All Mail"
        mu4e-trash-folder  "/[Gmail]/Trash")
  (mu4e t)

save file and restart emacs. To launch mu4e, meta(Alt) + x aka M-x , type mu4e and enter.

Conclusion & Further reading

For someone like me, who lives in terminal. mu4e is perfect, I recommend reading through manual . I have in the past used neomutt , it is a full-blown email client, Only issue with neomutt is new mails notifications, despite trying several solutions. I couldn’t get it work. mu4e have a package for showing desktop Notifications .

References