Email

A week ago, I toyed with the idea of using Gnus for reading Email in Emacs. As expected, I hated it at first. But then… ...

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? ...

Now that I’ve solved my Notmuch sync problems, I’m more inclined to move ahead with converting other content into emails and indexing them using Notmuch. I thought I’d start with my blog posts. ...

Remember my recent email fiasco, during which I ended up with tens of thousands of duplicate emails? I remember it. After storming off and ignoring the problem for a week, I decided I should do something about it. Today, I fixed it! ...

All I wanted was to use notmuch on my MBP to manage email, just like I do on my Mac Mini. The only viable solution I found was muchsync. There’s no macOS installer for it1, so I figured I’d compile it myself. A few years ago I promised myself that if something required ./configure && make && make install I would skip it. Well, I really wanted to try it, so off I went. The make command failed immediately because it couldn’t find notmuch.h. Great, path problems. After an hour of throwing things at the wall, adding some environment variables worked: ...

My on-again-off-again relationship with Hey email is off again

Notmuch can be used as a search engine from within Mutt and it’s super fast.

Using Mutt for email is awesome, but it makes me want to do everything in a terminal

Could I too start storing things as email and find them later using Notmuch?

I woke up from my trance and bailed on my disjointed bricolage of Fastmail->Gmail->Mimestream. Cobbling various pieces together just so I can use a single mail client on my Mac seemed…shortsighted. Mimestream is nice, but not that nice, you know? So I’m back in MailMate and/or Mu4e. Oh, and sometimes Apple Mail. But I’m thinking about switching back to notmuch from Mu4e. Now that I say it, I’m not sure this is any better :). At least I’m not relying on Gmail now, I guess. ...

Dammit I just lost an hour on Mastodon even though I’m supposed to be “off” social media. I have nothing to show for it, either. It’s insidious! I lost my head for a second and thought maybe I’d do the whole “Emacs from scratch” thing again. This time, I tried the new beta branch of Crafted Emacs because I like their approach on the new version. But yeah, it’s beta and things broke and I’m not good enough to troubleshoot. Back to Doom for now. ...

I don’t get many emails these days. Nor do I send many. And yet, I spend an inordinate amount of time futzing with how I get and sent emails. I’m doing that thing again where I overthink my email process. The only hard requirement I have with email is that it uses my own domain name. Hence, jack@baty.net. Email is still the key to many things, so allowing someone like Google to control that key is a no-go for me. My wife still uses a Comcast address, can you imagine? I get hives just thinking about it. She gets a lot more email than I do, and never gives any of this a second thought. ¯_(ツ)_/¯. ...

Notes on using Mimestream.

Journal blog post format changes. Mimestream for email. Arq backup problems. Tweaking the PaperMod theme.

I use Notmuch in Emacs for managing my email. It’s fast, powerful, and (once used to it) easy to use. There are a few oddities I’ve learned to work around. The first is with deleting messages. The manual for Notmuch states: Notmuch does not support, nor ever will, the deleting of messages Notmuch manual I’m ok with this, since Notmuch provides a way to essentially bury deleted messages using tags. I don’t necessarily need to actually delete the message file. Any message tagged with +deleted is hidden from searches unless explicitly included. Ignored tags are set in ~/.notmuch-config like so: ...

TL;DR: I’m sticking with HEY for my email, but there’s a surprise twist: I’m also sticking with Fastmail. Hear me out. I was initially disappointed with the implementation of custom domains in HEY. You can read the whole almost-rant here, but the short version is that I thought I was going to lose both my @hey.com address and my access to HEY World for quick blogging. And it would cost me $20 more per year for the priviledge. If I wanted to keep my address and HEY World, I’d have to pay for both accounts at something like $199/year. That wasn’t something I was interested in. I later learned that there is a discount for current users. This put the total at a much more reasonable $123/year for custom domains, my old address, HEY World, and the additional features of “HEY for Domains”. ...

(Updated with notes about the custom domain discount) Other than having a couple of nits to pick, I really like using HEY! for my email. After considering the pros and cons and waffling between dropping the service and going all-in, I’ve been leaning toward all-in. HEY offers an opinionated, clever, and pleasant set of features that’s not found elsewhere. A big missing piece for me has been custom domain support. ...

My first annual subscription to Basecamp’s HEY email service is about to expire, meaning it’s time to decide whether I will be renewing. I don’t think I will. This makes me sad, because I really like using HEY for email. They’ve done a great job re-thinking how we interact with email and most of their decisions have been spot on. I forward baty.net email from Fastmail to my HEY account and, now that they support SMTP forwarding, I can reply from there as well. Soon, they are likely to fully support custom domains, meaning I could move jack@baty.net directly into HEY and be done with it. ...