I really did try mu4e. Really. But the setup required a custom emacs build on macos, and I am unfortunately constrained to Macs for work at the moment, so it was kind of a non-starter to jump through so many hoops to get it working. And of course, I also highly value resilience, and nothing says unresilient than not being able to successfully build a crucial feature like mail handling into your editor of choice.

So that occassioned a turn towards notmuch. Oh my, how delightful. At it’s simplest, notmuch is just a xapian-powered tag database for your email. Imagine that, no crazy indexers or long-polling to check for new email. Notmuch just tags and allows you to search your email.

Combined with isync’s mbsync and msmtp, I now have a really functional and resilient email seutp in Emacs. Even more delightful is looking through my tag database and realizing that if I tag things effectively, finding all those board agenda emails for church are just a tag search away.

Of course, such things were always available in Gmail or a mail client. But I was always unimpressed with how slow Thunderbird or Mail.app got with lots of messages. And Google is reading all my messages, so that sucks too.

Combine the ease of syncing and tagging messages, and the fact that they exist in a directory on my computer, synced via Dropbox to all my other computers and my email suddenly mine again, not living on an IMAP server that I hope doesn’t fail me.