As all of you know by now, I’m a big fan of mu/mu4e for handling email. For me, one of its major attractions is that it runs in Emacs. For those of us who prefer to do as much as possible in Emacs, there are two popular email options: mu4e and notmuch for Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou has a really good demonstration of using the notmuch email client. This is the best presentation of notmuch functionality that I’ve seen. Notmuch is actually a command line utility that indexes and searches your email repository (much like mu) but it also has an Emacs interface that acts as a mail client in Emacs (like mu4e).
The big difference between notmuch and mu4e is that notmuch depends heavily on tags while mu4e doesn’t offer much support for tags and relies on its powerful search capabilities instead. Stavrou shows how to leverage the power of tags to get various views of your email. This works because the tags are essentially bits of metadata added to the messages so you can characterize a message as finely as you like by adding appropriate tags. The problem with this is that assigning appropriate tags is much like deciding what directory to store a message in. With mu4e, I can just throw everything into a single directory and use search to find a target message. On the other hand, tags can narrow a search more quickly. Either approach is fine and neither seems intrinsically better.
I even learned a useful trick from the video. It turns out that Ctrl+c Ctrl+z
while in message-mode will delete everything from point to the signature line. That’s really useful when responding to an email and since it’s a message-mode feature, it works in mu4e too.
The video is just short of 24 and a half minutes so you’ll need to schedule time. Like all of Stavrou’s videos, it’s worth the time.