I “settled” on using notmuch for my email, but now I’m reconsidering that decision.

Notmuch is great, but using it forces me to have two email stores. One is IMAP (via Fastmail). The other is my local notmuch database. Mbsync keeps things kind of synced, but it’s really only a few flags. Notmuch doesn’t delete or move email on the server. This means I’m managing, for example, my Inbox, in two places. It’s not hard, but is it necessary?

I need to read and manage email on my phone, and on both computers. After spending days wrangling issues with syncing between Macs, and knowing that there is a lot that I’m missing when viewing email on my phone, I’m beginning to feel that maybe doing my email this way isn’t ideal.

Email in Emacs is important to me, and if notmuch is causing issues, there’s always Mu4e. I used Mu4e for a long time before switching to notmuch. Mu4e is easier and feels “nicer” (subjective, I know). It also is a direct mapping of what’s on the IMAP server. This means that my email is my email is my email, if you know what I mean. There’s one version of it. I still have local copies of everything in ~/Mail, too.

So, my dream of putting my life in notmuch is on hold. I need things to be simpler right now, and using Mu4e makes things simpler for me.