Kiran Gangadharan

Emacs as email client with offlineimap and mu4e on OS X

· Kiran Gangadharan

Introduction

For something as trivial and important as email, it annoys me that I feel uncomfortable with any client I use. I’ve tried the Gmail interface, Mail.app, Airmail and Mailbox, but somehow I haven’t found myself entirely comfortable using any of these. What I’m looking for is a client that is easy to shoot up, quick to navigate between emails and can entirely depend on keyboard shortcuts alone. In short email on the terminal. Although I’ve been hearing good reviews about Mutt for a while now, I wanted to use Emacs for all the editing. So I finally decided to give mu4e a shot.

Here within, I’ve described the setup I’ve used(rather flicked) for setting up mu4e on OSX.

OfflineIMAP

OfflineIMAP is one of the key components here. In essence, OfflineIMAP allows you to download all your emails from an IMAP account into a directory in your local machine and keep both the local and remote repositories in sync. Think of it as ‘git’ cloning a remote repository(IMAP) into your local machine and then syncing future changes by pulling from remote and/or pushing local changes to it.

Installation

You can install offlineimap on OSX using homebrew like so:

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brew install offline-imap

Configuration

Once offlineimap has been installed, create a ~/.offlineimaprc file. Add the following configuration into it:

[general]
ui=TTYUI
accounts = Gmail
autorefresh = 5

[Account Gmail]
localrepository = Gmail-Local
remoterepository = Gmail-Remote

[Repository Gmail-Local]
type = Maildir
localfolders = ~/.Mail/[email protected]

[Repository Gmail-Remote]
type = Gmail
remotehost = imap.gmail.com
remoteuser = [email protected]
remotepass = sciencebitch!
realdelete = no
ssl = yes
cert_fingerprint = <insert gmail server fingerprint here>
maxconnections = 1
folderfilter = lambda folder: folder not in ['[Gmail]/Trash',
                                             '[Gmail]/Spam',
                                             '[Gmail]/All Mail',
                                             ]

The folderfilter option in the above configuration allows you to sync only selected folders from your remote repository(Gmail). In this case, I’ve used a lambda expression to blacklist the folders that I do not want to sync. If you were wondering where the lambda came from, offlinemaprc allows you to specify valid python expressions and even functions based on the requirements of the configuration. Pretty cool eh?

Also, if you don’t want to use the fingerprint for your server, you can instead add sslcacertfile and point it to your CA certificate.

For more options and their explanations, check out the the configuration file from the offlinemap source on GitHub.

Running

Once you’ve setup your configuration, open up a terminal and run:

offlineimap

If you’ve configured everything correctly, offlineimap will start pulling down all the email(with attachments) into localfolders. This may take quite a bit of time depending on the number of emails.

In the future you can use offlineimap -q to run in “quick mode”. This will perform lesser checks and in turn tends to be faster.

Mu

The emails that you pulled in the above step are stored in Maildir format in your machine. Mu is designed to index messages stored in this format. This allows you to do powerful and fast searches on your emails. In addition, it allows you to view messages and even extract attachments. The Mu cheatsheet can tell you all about it. So what is Mu4e then ?

Mu4e

Mu4e is an Emacs frontend for Mu. In other words Mu for Emacs. It allows you directly handle all your emails right from Emacs itself. Remember that, since mu4e is a just an interface, it can neither pull messages from nor push messages to, the server. Refer the user manual to learn more about what mu4e can and cannot do.

Installation

Installing mu is as simple as running:

brew install mu

If only it were that simple. Mu4e is a part of mu itself, and it requires a recent version of Emacs(>=22). Since the emacs that comes bundled with OSX(/usr/bin/emacs) satisfies this criteria, you could simply do:

brew install mu --with-emacs --HEAD

and be done with it. But what if you’re using the GUI Emacs from emacsformacosx or using a client installed via Homebrew? Thanks to this github issue, you can do:

EMACS=$(which emacs) brew install mu --with-emacs --HEAD

in which case, you could simply create an alias for emacs that points to your client. Ahh, all is well. Not.

Apparently, no matter what $(which emacs) points to, the above command seems to consider /usr/bin/emacs (this seems to be a workaround, but haven’t got it to work yet). In any case, you could solve this by setting /usr/bin/emacs as an alias to your client (in my case /usr/local/Cellar/emacs-mac/emacs-24.3-mac-4.8/bin/emacs). But before you do, move the old emacs elsewhere like so:

mv /usr/bin/emacs /usr/bin/emacs-bk
sudo ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/emacs-mac/emacs-24.3-mac-4.8/bin/emacs /usr/bin/emacs

Now run the command again:

EMACS=$(which emacs) brew install mu --with-emacs --HEAD

and everything should work just fine.

Running

Once the installation has been completed, run mu to start indexing your emails:

mu index --maildir=~/.Mail

This should just be a matter of few minutes. In the meantime, let us configure mu4e to work with Emacs.

Configuring Mu4e in Emacs

As the last step, we now need to setup Emacs to be able to send and receive emails using it’s interface.

Add the configuration below into you ~/.emacs file:

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(require 'mu4e)
(setq mu4e-maildir "~/.Mail")
(setq mu4e-drafts-folder "/[Gmail].Drafts")
(setq mu4e-sent-folder   "/[Gmail].Sent Mail")
;; don't save message to Sent Messages, Gmail/IMAP takes care of this
(setq mu4e-sent-messages-behavior 'delete)
;; allow for updating mail using 'U' in the main view:
(setq mu4e-get-mail-command "offlineimap")

;; shortcuts
(setq mu4e-maildir-shortcuts
    '( ("/INBOX"               . ?i)
       ("/[Gmail].Sent Mail"   . ?s)))

;; something about ourselves
(setq
   user-mail-address "[email protected]"
   user-full-name  "Blah Man"
   mu4e-compose-signature
    (concat
      "Cheers,\n"
      "Blah Man\n"))

;; show images
(setq mu4e-show-images t)

;; use imagemagick, if available
(when (fboundp 'imagemagick-register-types)
  (imagemagick-register-types))

;; convert html emails properly
;; Possible options:
;;   - html2text -utf8 -width 72
;;   - textutil -stdin -format html -convert txt -stdout
;;   - html2markdown | grep -v '&nbsp_place_holder;' (Requires html2text pypi)
;;   - w3m -dump -cols 80 -T text/html
;;   - view in browser (provided below)
(setq mu4e-html2text-command "textutil -stdin -format html -convert txt -stdout")

;; spell check
(add-hook 'mu4e-compose-mode-hook
        (defun my-do-compose-stuff ()
           "My settings for message composition."
           (set-fill-column 72)
           (flyspell-mode)))

;; add option to view html message in a browser
;; `aV` in view to activate
(add-to-list 'mu4e-view-actions
  '("ViewInBrowser" . mu4e-action-view-in-browser) t)

;; fetch mail every 10 mins
(setq mu4e-update-interval 600)

Since mu4e cannot help in sending emails, we need to use smtpmail for the same:

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;; configuration for sending mail
(setq message-send-mail-function 'smtpmail-send-it
      smtpmail-stream-type 'starttls
      smtpmail-default-smtp-server "smtp.gmail.com"
      smtpmail-smtp-server "smtp.gmail.com"
      smtpmail-smtp-service 587)

Save the file and close Emacs. In order to allow Emacs to connect with the gmail smtp server, you need to install gnutls. Homebrew comes to the rescue yet again:

brew install gnutls

Now, create a ~/.authinfo file and add the following into it:

machine smtp.gmail.com login <gmail username> password <gmail password>

You can also encrypt the above file by running:

gpg --output ~/.authinfo.gpg --symmetric ~/.authinfo

That’s all there is to it :) Now open Emacs, hit M-x mu4e RET and you should be all set! You can also extend your ~/.offlineimaprc to include more email accounts accordingly.

It’s not perfect yet, but I’m starting to like this setup. Although it irks me to open an html email due to rendering issues and the time taken to convert it to plain-text, I’m hoping to take care of that soon enough. Until then, I think I can live with this.

Suggestions, queries and improvements are welcome.