Re: [O] mail integration, advice?

[Florian Friesdorf]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2012 09:47:40 -0400, Matt Price <address@hidden> wrote:
> I'd like to take one more shot at returning to text-based email within
> emacs, mostly because I want to be able to integrate mail easily into
> my org-mode workflow.  The last time I tried this I used wanderlust,
> and I'd be willing to give it a try again but a couple of things have
> discouraged me in the past:
> - wl causes emacs to freeze up when it checks or sends mail, and can
> take quite a long while to complete these operations

I fetch emails with offlineimap - it seems to use a lot of
bandwith/time/cpu and I heard that mbsync might be better - nevertheless
it does it's job. The emails are placed into a maildir and indexed and
tagged with notmuch via a post sync hook.

I'm very happy with emacs + org-mode + notmuch, creating tasks from
email that link back to the email being one of the small but great
things.

> - wl seems to have gone quasi-dormant, with very little activity on
> the mailing list and no recent releases; it also relies on two other
> packages, FLIM and APEL, with similarly dormant mailing lists
> 
> So, I'm wondering what solutions other org users have settled on.  My
> current hopes for this:
> - allow me to continue using Thunderbird as a backup for e.g. images
> and highly formatted mails -- thunderbird is currently set up w/ local
> copies of IMAP folders for my current mail, plus local archives served
> on by dovecot that can be accessed both by thunderbird and by e.g.
> wanderlust.

you could index the thunderbird folders with notmuch, but I don't know
how it will behave if you move or delete messages.

> - fast search and easy-to-manage virtual folders of some kind -- I see
> mu and notmuch are very strong on both these fronts

notmuch searches are very fast, but the database takes disk space.
Indexing in recent versions is very very quick.

mail: 7.4GB
notmuch db: 3.6GB

> - easy, stable harvesting of email-based data through org-capture (if
> possible, this should allow me to archive a message and still be able
> to find it when I follow an org message link)

notmuch solely works with tags: something is in your inbox, if it has
the inbox tag. If notmuch starts to support moving messages to folder
and giving them implicit tags, the link would still be through notmuch
and not to a specific file. Maybe notmuch supports this already, I did
not have the time to investigate.

> - would be nice if configuration didn't require TONS of lisp code, a I
> am a very slow coder and these kinds of configuration tasks can be
> very daunting for me.

close to zero configuration needed and full "GUI" support through emacs
customize.

> - shouldn't slow down my workflow too much -- I should be able to very
> quickly check my email then return to an org buffer to continue
> writing.

It actually sped up my workflow massively and was together with org-mode
the number one reason to switch to emacs, after very very long years of
using vi derivates.

-- 
Florian Friesdorf <address@hidden>
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