![]() To get authentication details for your email provider the easiest thing to do is to search the web, and if you have a common email provider (like Gmail, Office365, Fastmail) you’ll likely find a blog with a sample configuration. And if you set the wrong options you might accidentally delete your whole email so spend a lot of time reading through them and try it out on a test account before you run it on your precious emails. The easiest solution is to use isync/mbsync, or it’s slower cousin offlineimap.īoth mbsync and offlineimap have gnarly configuration options that will make you learn quite a bit about the low level details of email authentication and Maildir. For pulling emails you can run a email server like Dovecot, but it’s quite a bit of effort to set up. For pushing emails Postfix works great (and has a sendmail interface) and I’ve never needed anything else. You now need a way to pull email to your local filesystem and push emails back out. I’ve heard msys2 is better but have never taken the time to understand it. It’s a bit clunky, and you may need to build some utilities (like isync, see below) yourself, but with a bit of work you can get a usable environment. It doesn’t require any special permissions, so as long as you can run external applications on your computer it should work. When all else fails there is good ol’ Cygwin. But if you can get Virtualbox running (or your organisation supports another virtualisation product) then it’s generally a good solution. In fact some organisations use security software that uses virtualisation making it impossible to install Virtualbox. However you can’t use it if there’s any other virtualisation on your machine like Docker for Windows. If you can’t then working in a Virtualbox VM for Linux is the next best option and you can configure it to be fairly seamless. There are a couple of creaky edges, mainly the filesystem is slow (which should be fixed in WSL2), but overall it’s the best solution if you can get the feature enabled. The best Windows option is Windows Subsystem for Linux - it lets you run a whole Linux environment and works pretty well with Windows. However if you’re working in Windows you have a few options. If your working environment supports Linux or Mac computers then it’s happy times. ![]() If you want to set up email from the command line or Emacs you’ll want to be working in a POSIXy environment, because that’s where all the tooling is. I’ll share some of my experience doing this for those who are hard to discourage. But unless email is a very large part of your working life (and it seems to be slowly losing out to instant messaging clients) it’s probably not worth the investment (unless you want to build a custom email automation tool one day!). ![]() The benefits are that it tends to be faster to get through emails (because they are on the local filesystem), you don’t need to change environments to use them and you can use all your favourite CLI tools on them. Finally if the server configuration is changed (like changing an authentication provider) you may have to spend a lot of time setting it up all over again. Getting calendar invites is possible with a bit of hacking, but seeing other people’s calendars is very difficult. Synchronising email addresses from the server can be difficult, and may need to be done in batches - but you might be able to manually. Building an address book of frequent contacts is a bit of a pain, but with some work is possible. Dealing with HTML and images and attachments works pretty well out of the box, unless you get a lot of custom office drawings in your email. Getting the basics of synchronising emails from an IMAP or Exchange server may take some time to setting up (and in some circumstances take a lot of time), but once they’re working it will be pretty smooth. It’s a good way to appreciate all the features of your current mail client, but you may be able to find a better use of your time. However it can be a whole heap of work, and as you get deeper into the features your mail client provides the amount of custom integration required grows very rapidly. Email in Emacs can be surprisingly featureful and handles HTML markup, images and can even send org markup with images and equations all from the comfort of an Emacs buffer. ![]() I do a lot of work in Emacs and at the command line, and I get quite a few emails so it would be great if I could handle my emails there too. ![]()
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