December 10, 2025
Inbox wars, Emacs edition
Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e
Emacs old‑schoolers try to tame email while Mac fans grumble and Gmail fights back
TLDR: An Emacs power‑user tried Mu4e to wrangle multiple inboxes offline, hitting snags with work email and Google’s sign‑in. Comments lit up with gripes about Mac Mail’s decline, hacks like Thunderbird creds and DavMail, plus jokes from eMule nostalgia to requests for Emacs spreadsheets.
An Emacs lifer tried to strap email into one tidy, offline inbox using Mu4e (an email tool inside Emacs) and got halfway there — personal mail, charity accounts, even a Fastmail trial — but work mail and Google’s sign‑in rules threw wrenches. The comment section turned into Inbox Wars: veterans vs modern app‑switchers, bow ties vs dashboards.
Big mood: one user mourned “the gradual decline of MacOS (and Mail.app),” cheering the move away from Apple’s default. Another dropped a spicy hack: borrow Thunderbird’s built‑in sign‑in tricks to appease Google’s finicky OAuth (that’s the modern “let apps securely log in for you”). Pragmatists chimed in with tools like pizauth to cleanly fetch tokens and DavMail to translate corporate inboxes from Office 365/Exchange. Translation for non‑nerds: people are finding clever bridges to make stubborn mail services play nice.
Meanwhile, the thread swerved into delightful chaos: someone asked if Emacs can be a spreadsheet and chart machine (answer: probably, because Emacs can do everything, allegedly), and another misread Mu4e as eMule and went full nostalgia meme. The vibe? Old tools, new tricks, and a lot of “don’t make me open a browser” energy. Even those who won’t touch Emacs are bookmarking the fixes, because everyone agrees: searching fast, working offline, and dodging distraction is the dream.
Key Points
- •The author integrates email into Emacs using Mu4e to consolidate interfaces and minimize distractions.
- •Emails are synced via IMAP and stored locally in Maildir to enable offline access and search.
- •mbsync had errors with Gmail, so OfflineIMAP was chosen for reliability despite being slower.
- •OfflineIMAP’s Python integration (keyring, google-auth) facilitates secure OAuth 2.0 authentication for Google without storing credentials in config files.
- •Google has deprecated app passwords, which proved unreliable, while Fastmail still uses app passwords.