[HN Gopher] Setting up Gmail in Doom Emacs using mbsync and mu4e
___________________________________________________________________
Setting up Gmail in Doom Emacs using mbsync and mu4e
Author : erwald
Score : 74 points
Date : 2021-11-06 19:12 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.erichgrunewald.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.erichgrunewald.com)
| User23 wrote:
| > Wait, why did I do this again? ... in this case for example by
| linking directly to email from org-mode files
|
| Org-mode. Capturing whatever into the appropriate note is
| wonderful. These days about 80% of the time my answer to why
| Emacs is org-mode. Not that there aren't other great note taking
| options, but I've yet to find one that integrates so fully with,
| well, everything.
|
| For all the doubters, I was right there with you 6 months ago.
| Who cares about yet another markdown clone am I right? Perhaps
| someone else can explain better, but in my case no amount of
| explanation really helped, I didn't get it until I did it.
| enchiridion wrote:
| I am proficient with emacs, but I've never gotten to the point
| where org-mode clicks. Any advice?
| User23 wrote:
| For me it was org-babel[1] that finally sucked me in. For
| example, I keep notes of various shell invocations as source
| blocks. Also various one-off SQL queries. Org-mode tables are
| surprisingly powerful too. Basically, a lot of things that I
| used to do occasionally are now contextualized and embedded
| in my notes.
|
| [1] https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html
| stragies wrote:
| And If you name tables in org-mode, you can reference them
| from shell with some simple functions, e.g. `fromOrg tsv
| Network.org:[MAC-List]`
| mickeyp wrote:
| Taking notes is the simplest. I started with outline-mode
| back in the day. Once you start taking notes you'll think: if
| only I had a way of cataloguing, tagging and prioritising
| tasks. Before long you'll start estimating tasks and creating
| agendas; then you'll want to tie in other parts of your life
| to your tasks and notes -- as nothing ever lives in a vacuum
| -- and... well, there you go. That's how it goes.
|
| Create a .org file and start writing is really the simplest.
| If you never make it past that, you still have an effective
| note taking system in Emacs.
| georgewsinger wrote:
| Has anyone switched from Spacemacs to Doom Emacs? Are there
| special advantages Doom offers that make this switch worthwhile?
| fayten wrote:
| I did, I used spacemacs for a few years, but switched to Doom
| at the beginning of 2020. It is dramatically faster in start up
| and usage. I also find the configuration a lot easier and
| straightforward. I did the initial switch because Java LSP was
| stalling out spacemacs constantly.
| doyougnu wrote:
| I can confirm a lot of what has already been said. I've used
| spacemacs since 2017, have contributed to it, and have written
| several private layers for it, such as a custom org layer.
|
| But I switch to Doom emacs literally two weeks ago and I'm
| never going back. I find doom to be much faster not just
| startup time but in general responsiveness (one major
| exception: hitting SPC and waiting for key binding tips to show
| seems to be much slower in doom than spacemacs). Other than
| that I found doom to be much easier to configure and much more
| configurable.
|
| The major selling point for me was that in doom emacs there is
| much much less ceremony in wrapping a new package in a module,
| and more importantly it is _easier_ to reuse documentation for
| those packages because most packages provide configuration
| examples using `use-package` anyway. My only hangup was less
| documentation around writing custom modules which took me about
| a day to figure out (I would advise to just read some of the
| source code or mimic a module that doom ships with).
|
| YMMV, but if you feel like you've attained a certain level of
| emacs maturity, I would 100% recommend trying it out. Be
| prepared that some modules, like the haskell module, don't ship
| with a lot of keybindings so you'll have to set those up
| yourself.
| Phenix88be wrote:
| I tried, when Spacemacs was somehow broken on my system. I
| didn't find anything better on Doom, and fixing Spacemacs was
| easier than switching to Doom. Using Doom, most of your muscle
| memory from Spacemacs is gone because not everything is
| configured the same (that is of course normal). But not all,
| and that make the experience weird to me.
|
| I also feel like Spacemacs is growing faster and has more
| feature than Doom, because more dev's are working on Spacemacs.
| But I might be wrong about that.
| mbil wrote:
| I switched. Doom starts much faster and feels generally
| snappier and more minimal. I like the configuration system. I
| use this Spacemacs module for Doom[0] to retain (most of) the
| Spacemacs keybindings and some of the functionality.
|
| [0] https://github.com/chenyanming/spacemacs_module_for_doom
| codethief wrote:
| Has anyone here used both offlineimap and mbsync and can speak to
| how these two compare?
| k2enemy wrote:
| I switched to mbsync from offlineimap about four years ago. I
| was having issues with offlineimap hanging during sync, as well
| as slow performance in general.
|
| I switched to mbsync and have had zero issues since. Just set
| it and forget it.
| bickwhale wrote:
| I've been using Neomutt for some time now and I'm already
| contemplating ditching it. Fewer emails these days are purely
| text, viewing them brings me right back to the browser anyways.
| Never got into the Org-Mode hype for Doom Emacs. I do love Magit
| though, it remains the best git tool I've used to date, but the
| pain of wrestling with some of my lsp plugins (Looking at ESS)
| has made waste more time than anything.
| upofadown wrote:
| I have found that running the html email through w3m generates
| usable text in almost all cases: text/html;
| w3m -I %{charset} -T text/html; copiousoutput;
|
| ... in your .mailcap. The result is usually better than what
| ends up in in the text portion of dual text/html emails.
| Particularly nice when someone thinks they need html to show a
| table.
| pfortuny wrote:
| mu4e is mail on steroids. If you need to automate anything you
| can grok a small script in an afternoon (much less if you are
| familiar with elisp) and have it work for you in ways no other
| mail agent will.
|
| My need: write personalized exams for my (50-ish) students,
| send an email for each with his respective exam, and upon
| receiving the replies, save each attachment in its own
| directory.
|
| Some perl+latex+mu4e+elisp ans voila.
|
| Edit: I refuse to use my Uni's version of moodle for long-reply
| exams. Also using pdftools has changed my life.
| rvdginste wrote:
| I discovered Doom Emacs a couple of months ago and it made me use
| emacs more often again. Doom Emacs is well made and makes
| configuration of emacs a lot faster and easier. I've noticed that
| a lot of file types have support from an LSP server and setting
| that up is also easy.
|
| Long time ago, I used to read email using wanderlust on emacs. I
| remember I really liked it, it was very powerfull in handling
| email and it had really good imap (and offline) support. The only
| drawback was related to handling html email. Back then that was
| not that much of a problem because I used it for a lot of
| mailinglists which were typically text only, and the remaining
| email was often sent in both a text and a html version.
|
| Anyone using email in emacs and has a good solution to deal with
| html email? Both receiving and sending? I kinda remember reading
| about people writing email in markdown and have it converted to
| html when sending it out.
| tmalsburg2 wrote:
| Mu4e can render HTML e-mails in Emacs (using Emacs' shr render
| engine). Works well enough for most cases. When it doesn't,
| there is a command for opening the message in your browser of
| choice. Re sending HTML: I personally think it's a bad idea and
| don't do it. But I think it's possible to write e-mails in org
| mode markup and them have them automatically converted to HTML.
| Probably easy to build something similar for Markdown, if it
| doesn't exist yet.
| jfmc wrote:
| I'm very happy with mbsync and mu4e. The only drawback is that
| email fetching+indexing can be very slow (10 to 30 seconds),
| compared with the instantaneous gmail web interface. I'm not sure
| if this is poor configuration on my side, or some other
| bottlenecks (mbsync, mu indexing, IMAP protocol).
| handstad wrote:
| 10-30 seconds sounds very slow indeed. It used to be slow for
| me (over 10 seconds against my university server), but I
| discovered it was because I had not deleted emails and
| propogated that to the server, I had only marked them for
| deletion (d), not deleted (D), and so there was some kind of
| syncing back and forth each time of quite many emails with
| mbsync. For me now it is always under 5 seconds for syncing and
| indexing, usually quicker.
| contravariant wrote:
| I'm not sure if the gmail interface is instantaneous or if it's
| just using tricks to make it seem that way.
|
| I've regularly waited up to a minute for an email I've just
| sent to arrive on someone else's account. A large part of this
| delay seems to be for some weird undo feature they've added
| which you can no longer fully disable.
| taeric wrote:
| Would be great if there was an option for those of us that have
| enabled the "2-step verification" setting for our account. :(
| eddieh wrote:
| You might want to store application specific passwords in the
| Keychain.
|
| Here is how to do it in .mbsyncrc
|
| https://gist.github.com/eddieh/8c853c6cf8ffb3ad87e0720eb50f8...
|
| And here is how to do it in .msmtprc
|
| https://gist.github.com/eddieh/5b4df4a8a98ea202e6ebb020871b0...
| eddieh wrote:
| And for Gmail specifically you might want to look at the mbsync
| option PipelineDepth
|
| As noted in the .mbsyncrc gist:
|
| > _The value is "used to limit average bandwidth consumption
| (GMail may require this if you have a very fast connection)."
| Turns out the same is true for iCloud. There's probably some
| optimized value greater than "1" that can be used, but this
| works for me._
|
| I actually have it set to 5 now.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-11-06 23:00 UTC)