Irreal

As you all know, I handle my email with mu4e and am very happy with it. But it’s not the only possibility. Notmuch and Gnus are popular choices but there’s also the builtin Rmail. It doesn’t get a lot of attention and many are only vaguely, if at all, aware of it.

Ben Card is an Rmail user and finds that it meets his needs well. He likes its simplicity and easy configuration. He’s got a post that describes how he uses Rmail, his configuration for it, and how to implement multiple accounts. He also has links to two videos (1, 2) where he covers the same material.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Rmail, I’d watch the to videos before reading the post. After doing all that, my conclusion is that mu4e (and probably any of the other apps) is a better solution. One of the great features of mu4e—one might even say its whole point—is its powerful search capabilities. Following Ben Maughan, I put all my saved emails in a single file and use search to find whatever I need. It’s simple and powerful and I don’t have to decide where to put each email or remember where I put it if I need to retrieve it. Rmail lets you store your emails in separate files but doesn’t—as far as I can see—have an integrated search function.

Configuring multiple accounts is fairly simple but seems a bit ad hoc. It boils down to writing functions that set Rmail’s environment for a particular account. Card shows how to do this in detail in the second video.

Still, if you’re looking for a simple, lightweight email client that runs under Emacs, it’s worth taking a look at Rmail.

Update [2021-01-23 Sat 14:47]: GNUS → Gnus

David Wilson has another video up in his series on configuring and using mu4e to handle email from within Emacs. His past videos have already covered the hard parts of configuring mu4e and mbsync. The current video is about using mu4e to compose and send email.

Most of that is straightforward but Wilson also demonstrates how to attach file, save and edit a draft, and cryptographically sign one or all emails. I even learned that you can “directly” compose and send an email without going through the mu4e menu.

If you’re new to mu4e or want to see what using it looks like, Wilson’s video will give you a good overview. The video is just over 42 and a half minutes so you’ll need to set aside some time for it.

One of my daily tasks involves making a log entry in which I have to use yesterday’s date. That’s pretty easy with Org dates but the dates in the log don’t have the usual Org markup of square or angle brackets. They’re just plain dates like this: 2021-01-16. I have a function to enter dates like these bound to Ctrl+c d. For a long time, I just used this shortcut to enter today’s date and fixed it manually. That was easy enough except at a month change but was still pretty silly.

A couple of years ago, I got fed up and decided to write a function that would directly enter yesterday’s date. Getting yesterday’s date is way harder than it should be but after a bit of research, I found the secret spell and wrote the function. Recently, I’ve had a need to enter the date from two days ago. The first couple of times I just entered yesterday’s date with my function and fixed it manually but rather than go through another long period of making manual adjustments, I thought I’d just fix my function to take a numerical argument so that it could enter a day from \(n\) days ago.

Unlike the original function, the change was trivial. If you have a similar need, here’s the function:

1: (defun jcs-yesterday (days)
2:   "Insert yesterday's date."
3:   (interactive "p")
4:   (let ((ts (decode-time)))
5:     (setf (nth 3 ts) (- (nth 3 ts) (if days days 1)))
6:     (insert (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d" (apply #'encode-time ts)))))

As an (unintended) side effect, I can even enter a negative number and get a date \(n\) days in the future. If your use case involves entering dates in the future, you can change the meaning of \(n\) so that positive arguments move forward by changing the \(-\) sign in line 5 to \(+\).