alt Hacker NewsI tried setting up mu4e once. It wasn’t worth it. It took me literally a few hours of reading random blog posts to figure out the configuration, and that was only to download email. Never got around to setting up sending them, which is a totally separate process. Even then, there were lots of issues. First, it’s slow. Loading an email had a noticeable pause and was slower than GMail. Also, you can’t avoid HTML email nowadays. There’s a very basic render, but expect all the formatting to be wrong. I also ran into rate limits from Google because we get way too much email at work. That’s not mu4e’s fault, but just another obstacle. Can’t really have my inbox be one hour behind real time.
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This was my second attempt to get email working on Emacs and I gave up the first time, too. I persisted this time and I _think_ it will pay off. There is the obvious danger of this becoming another "project", but I'll make a note to check-in again in six months. It's an experiment!
I've not seen the other things you mentioned. I only check for email every 10 minutes, but opening and (especially) searching for emails seem much faster than doing it in Gmail. Plus, I can do searches across email accounts, like all unreads across all three accounts. That was definitely slower in the online clients.
Finally, there's a quick ('a' then 'v') way to just open a message in a browser if the HTML is too thick.
> Can’t really have my inbox be one hour behind real time.
Why not? Does your job mandate that you watch your inbox constantly, and respond immediately to all messages? How do you get anything else done?
> Also, you can’t avoid HTML email nowadays
This is the reason I haven't tried all the email tools that seem fun to play with, but not worth it :/
I have been using mu4e for years, and am generally happy with it, and yet... I've never recommended it to anyone else. Unlike, say, org-mode or magit, which I'd happily evangelize.
The pain points are what other commenters have said:
- I don't find the default config a good fit for me, and run it heavily customized. As someone said everything in Emacs turns into a project...
- Performance can be an issue, especially indexing new mail (and especially if you like to lug around a copy of most of your emails locally as I do). On a laptop while traveling this used to be more of a problem, but newer versions are notieably quicker and newer laptops have better battery life.
- HTML rendering isn't great. Thankfully I don't get too many important messages that isn't just plain text. This might be a reasonable use case for xwidget-webkit though I'd imagine there are security/privacy issues to work out. (Another Emacs project -- yay!)
When I started I thought it would be an efficient way to get through lots of emails, and it has been for the most part. I'm just not sure I've saved time overall unless one counts the hours configuring it as "entertainment / hobby" rather than "work".