Ben Maughan over at Pragmatic Emacs has a great post on integrating mu4e and Org mode. He has what I think is a near perfect email setup:
- An inbox that is empty except for unread emails
- One folder to hold all his archived emails.
These are in service of his overriding email philosophy: inboxes make terrible TODO lists.
We’ve all done that sort of thing. We leave an email in the inbox to remind us to take some action associated with it. What invariably happens is that we end up with hundreds of emails in our inbox and probably never act on them. Maughan’s idea is that you read the email and either delete it or store it in the single archiving folder. If the email requires some action you generate an Org TODO with a capture template that includes a link to the email. Notice how there’s no need to keep read emails in your inbox.
One of the best parts of Maughan’s setup is that you can handle your email from within Emacs. If you’re like me, that means that you’ll spend almost all your tube time in either Emacs or your browser. For this to work, especially archiving everything in one folder, your email client needs to have good search capabilities. Since mu4e is based on mu, an email indexing utility, you automatically get fast searching with it.
Unless you’re completely satisfied with your email setup, be sure to take a look at Maughan’s post. If you don’t have special needs, like John Wiegley’s, it’s hard to imagine an easier or more efficient way of handling your email chores.