Re: [O] A mail client that is org-mode compatible

[Suvayu Ali]

Hello Viktor and Igor,

Sorry for the late response, I was on holidays.

On Wed, Jan 02, 2013 at 01:38:40PM +0100, Viktor Rosenfeld wrote:
> Suvayu Ali wrote:
>
> > On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 08:29:12AM +0100, Gour wrote:
> >
> > I use notmuch for indexing only, and read and send emails from mutt.
> > Although I do not use gnus, I do use emacs as my editor (hence
> > message-mode) to compose emails; there I find Org is supported rather
> > well.  For linking to emails, I have been using org-notmuch quite
> > successfully for the last year now.
> >
> > If you are interested, feel free to ask I can share more details.
>
> I'm interested in your mutt+notmuch setup.

Syncing:

I use offlineimap to sync my Gmail account to a maildir.  The
configuration for this part is pretty basic.  In my offlineimap
postsynchook, I call `notmuch new`.  This indexes new emails.  I do this
every 5 minutes via a cron job (script attached).


Indexing:

Now my notmuch has a post-new hook which updates the tags I want to set.
It is basically a sequence of

  notmuch tag -<tagname> -- <query>  # to remove tags
  notmuch tag +<tagname> -- <query>  # to add tags

To make date based queries I use something like this

  $(($(date +%s) - <seconds>)))))

in the query, e.g. <seconds> can be 604800 to specify one week ago.
This post-new hook is just the shell script <notmuchdb>/hooks/post-new.


Reading & responding to emails:

To make notmuch queries from mutt I use the excellent mutt fork, mutt-kz
<https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz>.  I have managed to package it for
fedora replacing mutt from the repositories (spec file attached).

The README.notmuch in the repository above is pretty clear and concise.
Other than the interactive search it offers, I have also written a shell
script to filter threads by message-id or subject (attached).

I use emacsclient to respond.  I have not customised message-mode,
mostly due to lack of time.  So far I find the defaults are quite
acceptable, so I am not that motivated to customise just yet :-p.


Browsing, searching and linking to emails:

I can use the notmuch emacs client to browse and search through the
email archives (try M-x notmuch or M-x notmuch-search).  There is also a
very nice contributed library called notmuch-pick that offers a rather
nice threaded view.

To link to emails from Org mode, I use the library org-notmuch from
org-mode/contrib.  To use, just add contrib to the load-path and
require.  Now you can store a link to emails with org-store-link while
viewing it in the notmuch emacs client and insert the link later with
org-insert-link or org-insert-link-global.  As far I have noticed, it
can link to specific messages in threads, not just threads.


Caveat:

I have noticed sometimes the notmuch emacs client barfs at html email
sent from broken clients.  That said I did notice the latest version of
notmuch (0.15) address html email issues by being able to choose
specific MIME types to view for multipart messages.  Here is a quote
from the NEWS file:

  Visibility of MIME parts can be toggled

    Each part of a multi-part MIME email can now be shown or hidden
    using the button at the top of each part (by pressing RET on it or
    by clicking).  For emails with multiple alternative formats (e.g.,
    plain text and HTML), only the preferred format is shown initially,
    but other formats can be shown using their part buttons.  To control
    the behavior of this, see
    `notmuch-multipart/alternative-discouraged` and
    `notmuch-show-all-multipart/alternative-parts`.


Hopefully I have given enough information about my setup.

GL,

--
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.

offlineimap-cron
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filter-mutt-thread
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mutt.spec
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