Introduction

Like most people these days I have quite a few email addresses, personal, old personal email, and school. In the past I’ve tried using Emacs to manage all of these in one place. However, when I added a work email account into the mix that didn’t have IMAP enabled it was finally enough to make me go back to using the web clients.

Recently I started to get the itch to bring the config into my dotfiles, since the biggest pain was setting it all up on a new computer and making it feel fragile.

Guides:

Notmuch config of my dotfiles:

https://github.com/Emiller88/dotfiles/tree/master/shell/notmuch

Fetching the Mail

In the past I’ve tried offlineimap but it’s slow when you have to pull down years and years of email. So I first started with mbsync(I’ve used the arch wiki because it explains more than the actual documentation in my opinion).

To get that set up:

sudo apt install isync

and then add a ~/.mbsyncrc file and configure it according to one of the above guides or the arch wiki. I will try to avoid going over things that I just copied and pasted and they worked, in order to keep this short.

An issue that I ran into later down the road was that mbsync doesn’t sync just any flag/label/tag back to Gmail. Enter gmailieer. Which was more of a pain to setup.

To install from here

sudo apt-get install gmailieer

The chicken and the egg problem with gmailieer is that it needs notmuch set up in the .mail dir. So when I was setting gmailieer up, notmuch was already up and running for me. We’ll come back to it.

With gmailieer the important part, is if I check my email on my phone, another computer, or Emacs, it will update as read, archived, deleted, and most importantly the tags will be the same on it. For an added bonus it works for my work account that uses Gsuite since it uses their API and not IMAP.

Now one key issue I had with gmailieer and my setup is that it depends on the python3-notmuch package, which is in the Ubuntu repos but not in pypi. So this makes it necessary to use a different version of python than Conda 3.6(default in 18.04 but you can use the python-notmuch package if you’re on 16.04) I had to do the following(I use pyenv to manage different python versions).

sudo apt install python3-notmuch
cd ~/.mail
pyenv local 3.7.0 # or whatever version you like

We need to initialize the notmuch database.

sudo apt-get install notmuch
cd ~/.mail
notmuch

Here you’ll be prompted with some questions to get your config going. Below is an example of what it’ll look like afterwards

[database]
path=/home/$USER/.mail

[user]
name=Edmund Miller
[email protected]
[email protected];[email protected];

[new]
tags=new
ignore=Trash;*.json;

[search]
exclude_tags=trash;deleted;spam;

[maildir]
synchronize_flags=true

Checking Mail in the Background

Next we need to setup the mail to be ran in the background every so often. This guide has a great setup for it.

mklink checkmail.service $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/systemd/user/checkmail.service
mklink checkmail.timer $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/systemd/user/checkmail.timer

And start and enable the timer

systemctl --user start checkmail.timer
systemctl --user enable checkmail.timer

The checkmail.service calls checkmail.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash

STATE=$(nmcli networking connectivity)

if [ $STATE = 'full' ]; then
echo "Syncing email1"
cd /home/emiller/.mail/email1/
gmi sync
echo "Syncing email2"
cd /home/emiller/.mail/email2/
gmi sync
echo "Syncing work"
cd /home/emiller/.mail/work/
gmi sync
echo "Checking school"
# Non gmail email
    mbsync -V school
    exit 0
fi
echo "No internet connection."
exit 0

The gmi sync command does a push followed by a pull so the tags from the local overwrite anything that’s on the remote. So later we’ll write rules to tag the new mail coming in.

Tagging the Mail

The next step is to tag the mail. For that I use notmuch I tried mu in the past but it works by moving the emails into various dirs instead of just tagging them and I found it messed with how the remote emails were treated too often. Gmailieer pulls the tags down by default. But if we want to tag our mail locally we’ll need to expand checkmail.sh. afew is another option for more elaborate initial tagging, but I didn’t want to have more dependencies.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

STATE=$(nmcli networking connectivity)

function tagMail {
echo "Running tag additions to tag new mail"

# github
notmuch tag +github              -- from:[email protected] AND tag:new
notmuch tag +github              -- from:[email protected] AND tag:new
notmuch tag -inbox               -- tag:github AND tag:new

# CI
notmuch tag +CI                  -- from:[email protected] AND tag:new
notmuch tag +CI                  -- from:[email protected] AND tag:new
notmuch tag -inbox               -- tag:CI AND subject:Passed

# Mailing Lists
notmuch tag +list/emacs -inbox   -- from:[email protected] AND tag:new
notmuch tag +list/haskell -inbox -- from:[email protected] AND tag:new
notmuch tag +list/IPFS -inbox    -- from:[email protected] AND tag:new
notmuch tag +list/rust -inbox    -- from:[email protected] AND tag:new
notmuch tag +list/nixos -inbox   -- from:[email protected] AND tag:new

# Remove new
notmuch tag -new                 -- tag:new
}
if [ $STATE = 'full' ]; then
echo "Syncing email1"
cd /home/emiller/.mail/email1/
gmi sync
echo "Syncing email2"
cd /home/emiller/.mail/email2/
gmi sync
echo "Syncing work"
cd /home/emiller/.mail/work/
gmi sync
echo "Checking school"
# Non gmail email
    mbsync -V school
echo "Running notmuch new"
    notmuch new
echo "Tagging mail"
tagMail
    exit 0
fi
echo "No internet connection."
exit 0

So what we’re doing here is first calling notmuch new which tags everything according to this section of the config. Which just tags everything with new and ignores anything with the Trash tag.

[new]
tags=new
ignore=Trash;*.json;

Deleting Email

Notmuch by default doesn’t tag things with +trash which makes gmail move the emails to the trash. Here’s a snippet that does that. I have this bound to d.

(defun +notmuch/search-delete ()
   (interactive)
  (notmuch-search-add-tag (list "+trash" "-inbox" "-unread"))
  (notmuch-tree-next-message))

WIP: Sending Email

WIP: Currently I can only get this to work with my primary email address.

To set this up we’ll need to get started with pass. I suggest you have a look at the Doom Notmuch module if you’re not using Doom to give you an idea of any features you need to setup.

First setup ~/.msmtprc

# Set default values for all following accounts.
defaults
auth           on
tls            on
tls_trust_file /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
logfile        ~/.msmtp.log

# Gmail
account        gmail
host           smtp.gmail.com
port           587
from           [email protected]
user           USER1
passwordeval   pass mail/USER1

Then we’ll setup pass.

pass init <GPG KEY>
pass insert mail/USER1

And type in the password.

You should be good to go and when in notmuch hit C and the C-c C-c to send and C-c C-k to cancel.

<normal-state> C    Compose new mail.