Consolidating my email handling in Emacs

Published on: 2025-04-23 14:53 • 1 min read

If I were to only have one computer, I’d use notmuch for email in Emacs. I might also collect non-email stuff as notmuch messages so I can search everything.

But I now have 3 computers; 2 running macOS and one running (Fedora) Linux. Notmuch takes too much of my energy to keep synced between machines. So how about Mu4e? Mu4e is probably the “nicest” Emacs package for managing email, but it still required a local copy of all my messages. This means configuring mbsync on all machines.

It’s a lot, so I’ve decided to “simplify” things and use Gnus exclusively for email in Emacs. Gnus is weird and hard to get ones head around, but it’s built-in and it only requires a ~/.gnus.el file on each machine.

I don’t get fancy notmuch searching, and I don’t get a full copy of my email store. But, I get fewer dependencies and not nearly as many “How do I keep this all in order?” issues.