An Easy Tutorial for Setting Up Mu4e and Mbsync

Those of you who have been around for a while know that I’m a huge fan of mu/mu4e. I use it everyday to read and send all my email. You may also remember that I had a difficult time getting it installed and set up. Part of that is because I’m on a Mac and things are a little different there but even for Linux users configuring mbsync can be tricky.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, skizmi has a nice post that he advertises as mu4e for Dummies. It’s a succinct guide for installing and configuring mu, mu4e, and mbsync to handle multiple Gmail accounts. It’s a really handy resource if you’re trying to get mu4e working.

If you are thinking about moving to mu4e, I urge you to read Ben Maughan’s excellent post on how he uses mu4e. The TL;DR is that he acts on every email—perhaps by turning it into a TODO item to be handled later—right away and all emails that he keeps go into a single folder. The idea is to let mu’s fast and flexible search facilities locate whatever old email you need. I’ve been using his system for a couple of years and can tell you it’s absolutely faster and easier than trying to file emails into separate folders. Maughan has a series of mu4e tutorials that are also worth looking at.

I’ve used browser based mail readers, pine, mutt, iMail, and a bunch of others and mu4e is by far the most enjoyable and powerful. If you’re interested in trying it out, skizmi’s post is a good place to start.

This entry was posted in General and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.