Email-setup

Setting up E-mail

This tutorial is to show how to setup email receiving, indexing, sending and viewing it.

Understanding email in this context

For our purposes, an email is a file that is stored somewhere. A single email is a single file stored in a directory somewhere.

Requirements

isync This program downloads mail from server. See man mbsync
notmuch This program tags received mail and indexes them. For eg, an email about rock music can be tagged with "rock", "music", etc so that later, we can search them.
afew This program is to handle automatic-tagging to notmuch. while it is possible to do it directly through notmuch, afew makes it easier
emacs or neomutt or mutt This is the frontend where you read and write emails.

isync

mbsync is the program developed by isync project. mbsync looks for a file ~/.mbsyncrc for it's configuration. Since it downloads mail, it needs your password too. It's better to use app-passwords if your provider supports them and use `pass` to get password.

See it's arch-wiki page for more details. The structure and meaning of relevant block is included in the example

###########################
# Conf for mbsync #########
# put this in ~/.mbsyncrc #
###########################

#account name
IMAPAccount NAME
Host imap.domain.tld
User name@domain.tld
Pass "hunter2"
#use pass with:
#PassCmd sh script_name
SSLType IMAPS
CertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt

#Store is a collection of mailboxes. Say you have mailboxes like
#inbox, spam, trash, draft, etc, those are stored in a single store
#Seperate accounts have seperate stores.
IMAPStore NAME-remote
Account NAME

#here, local store is defined. you're going to download emails so
#you'll have to tell it so save somewhere.
MailDirStore NAME-local
Subfolders Verbatim
     # / at end is important
Path ~/mail/
Inbox ~/mail/Inbox

channel NAME
Far :NAME-remote:
Near :NAME-local:
#sync's all folders it can find. If you have a folder you don't want
#to sync, use ! in the pattern. Like: "!Spam"
Patterns *
#if folder dosen't exists, make it. be it remote or local.
Create Both
#Saves synchronization state files.
SyncState *

notmuch

Notmuch indexes mails so you can search within the mail. It also stores tags for organization. See `man notmuch` which has very good documentation.

Run `notmuch setup` so that it does all the initial heavylifting. Then, edit ~/.notmuch-config with the option below. The config file itself is very well written and you should read it.

After receiving mail, you should run `notmuch new`.

This config makes it so new mails are tagged with tag "new" only. Everything else should be handled by afew.

#Find the correct line and make it as below
[new]
  tags=new;
  ignore=

afew

Afew makes it easy to automatically tag new messages into whatever tag you like. While notmuch can do it too, it is more complex and afew is a lot more easier to write filters.

You can even download filters from internet as python files that implement much complex filters. Just download filter and add it to ~/.config/afew/.

The man page of afew is very well written. Read it.

You can alias this command to run mbsync, notmuch and afew at once.

alias mailsync="mbsync -a && notmuch new && afew --tag --new"

emacs

Finally, to read messages, install `notmuch-emacs` package from your distro's repo. Then type `M-x notmuch` and view on a tag like `new` or `all mail`.