Things I'd like to see in mu4e

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Hey,

So I've been using mu4e for a while and there are a lot of things I
really love about it. There are also a few things I actually wish were
a lot nicer. Here's my braindump of things:

1) So I made mu4e-uqueue because I wanted the ability to list how much
unread mail was in each folder, but having it be in a separate buffer
is not really ideal. Instead, I really wish I could extend the main
buffer for things like this.

It would be great if *mu4e-main* was extensible in the way that
orgmode's agenda display is reasonably extensible.

2) Another specific mu4e main buffer thing I would like updated:
It would be great if the "flush" option only showed up if there was
actually mail to flush, and if it indicated how much mail there was
to flush.

3) The contact auto-complete is pretty great but I find that sometimes I
typo'ed an email address in the past and now there's no way to remove
it from my tab completion, and there's no way to order the preferred
completion, so that's kind of frustrating.

4) It would also be great if there was case-insensitive tab completion
of email addresses, especially on the real name aspect.

5) I kind of miss how great w3m rendering in gnus was... I wonder how
hard it would be to add similar rendering to mu4e?

6) I somewhat wonder what kind of headers are indexed in mu, and how
likely things might be expanded? For example, it would be useful for
me to be able to check the Delivered-To header since I forward a work
email account to a personal one, and so that would make it easier to
filter my mail in some ways. But that's not really important I
suppose... just curious.

I don't know how useful such a braindump is. I think this email roughly
is ordered from things that I feel strongly about from most to least.

Overall though, mu4e is really great, and I'm really happy with having
made the switch!

- Chris

[Dirk-Jan C. Binnema]

Hi Christopher,

Thanks for your suggestions; it's helpful to see what people like/miss
in mu/mu4e. Some more comments inline.

On 2012-08-14 23:55, Christopher Allan Webber wrote:

> Hey,

> So I've been using mu4e for a while and there are a lot of things I
> really love about it. There are also a few things I actually wish were
> a lot nicer. Here's my braindump of things:

> 1) So I made mu4e-uqueue because I wanted the ability to list how much
> unread mail was in each folder, but having it be in a separate buffer
> is not really ideal. Instead, I really wish I could extend the main
> buffer for things like this.

> It would be great if *mu4e-main* was extensible in the way that
> orgmode's agenda display is reasonably extensible.

Yeah, have this on my radar. It's a bit tricky though because the mu4e
frontend and backend are only loosely coupled; this is usually an
advantage, but sometimes it makes things a bit harder.

One way to do it would be to dynamically generate the main page (as in
mu4e-uqueue); see e.g..
http://osdir.com/ml/emacs-orgmode-gnu/2012-04/msg01236.html

> 2) Another specific mu4e main buffer thing I would like updated:
> It would be great if the "flush" option only showed up if there was
> actually mail to flush, and if it indicated how much mail there was
> to flush.

Ah, I see. Shouldn't be too hard.

> 3) The contact auto-complete is pretty great but I find that sometimes I
> typo'ed an email address in the past and now there's no way to remove
> it from my tab completion, and there's no way to order the preferred
> completion, so that's kind of frustrating.

mu4e depends on the built-in emacs completion mechanisms (in particular,
substring matching), so maybe something can be configured for that.

> 4) It would also be great if there was case-insensitive tab completion
> of email addresses, especially on the real name aspect.

(setq completion-ignore-case t)
should do the trick; I'll set it as default (buffer-local) for the next
mu4e.

> 5) I kind of miss how great w3m rendering in gnus was... I wonder how
> hard it would be to add similar rendering to mu4e?

What specifically are you missing? Did you try setting `mu4e-html2text-command'?

> 6) I somewhat wonder what kind of headers are indexed in mu, and how
> likely things might be expanded? For example, it would be useful for
> me to be able to check the Delivered-To header since I forward a work
> email account to a personal one, and so that would make it easier to
> filter my mail in some ways. But that's not really important I
> suppose... just curious.

You can see the list in lib/mu-msg-fields.h. I'm trying to /not/ index
much more, but I've been thinking about adding a 'mailing-list' field,
so you could search messages by their list and/or have a column for the
mailing list in mu4e.

A tool like procmail might be useful to move your work-emails to a
certain folder, based on any field. One day, mu will have its own
procmail, but alas, not yet.

> I don't know how useful such a braindump is. I think this email roughly
> is ordered from things that I feel strongly about from most to least.

> Overall though, mu4e is really great, and I'm really happy with having
> made the switch!

Thanks! Feel free to add more suggestions, ideas.

Best wishes,
Dirk.

--
Dirk-Jan C. Binnema Helsinki, Finland
e:dj...@djcbsoftware.nl w:www.djcbsoftware.nl
pgp: D09C E664 897D 7D39 5047 A178 E96A C7A1 017D DA3C

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Thanks for the reply!

> > 5) I kind of miss how great w3m rendering in gnus was... I wonder how
> > hard it would be to add similar rendering to mu4e?
>
> What specifically are you missing? Did you try setting `mu4e-html2text-command'?

I did try that.

(setq mu4e-html2text-command "w3m") doesn't seem to work. The things I
really liked about w3m are:

- It did *AMAZING* work with formatting text in a way that seemed
appropriate... I could get emails from an airline with the different
bits of my itinerary's columns all lining up in a way that just
looked really stellar.
- It could do inline images
- Links were actual links, in that you could hover over the link and
hit enter and it would open it in the browser. I really miss that.

> > 6) I somewhat wonder what kind of headers are indexed in mu, and how
> > likely things might be expanded? For example, it would be useful for
> > me to be able to check the Delivered-To header since I forward a work
> > email account to a personal one, and so that would make it easier to
> > filter my mail in some ways. But that's not really important I
> > suppose... just curious.
>
> You can see the list in lib/mu-msg-fields.h. I'm trying to /not/ index
> much more, but I've been thinking about adding a 'mailing-list' field,
> so you could search messages by their list and/or have a column for the
> mailing list in mu4e.

Ah great to know.

> A tool like procmail might be useful to move your work-emails to a
> certain folder, based on any field. One day, mu will have its own
> procmail, but alas, not yet.
>

> Thanks! Feel free to add more suggestions, ideas.

Okay, one more then :)

Is it possible that at some point we might have a:

recipient:us...@example.org

field? I find doing a cc: OR to: OR: bcc: thing to be really tedious.

[Dirk-Jan C. Binnema]

Hi Christopher,

On 2012-08-15 22:53, Christopher Allan Webber wrote:

> Thanks for the reply!

> > > 5) I kind of miss how great w3m rendering in gnus was... I wonder how
> > > hard it would be to add similar rendering to mu4e?
> >
> > What specifically are you missing? Did you try setting `mu4e-html2text-command'?

> I did try that.

> (setq mu4e-html2text-command "w3m") doesn't seem to work. The things I
> really liked about w3m are:

Hmm, that's odd. Is there a w3m binary on your system?

> - It did *AMAZING* work with formatting text in a way that seemed
> appropriate... I could get emails from an airline with the different
> bits of my itinerary's columns all lining up in a way that just
> looked really stellar.
> - It could do inline images
> - Links were actual links, in that you could hover over the link and
> hit enter and it would open it in the browser. I really miss that.

Aha; that means using emacs' w3m mode, and using that as the viewer
(that is different from using it for html->text, obviously).

> Okay, one more then :)

> Is it possible that at some point we might have a:

> recipient:us...@example.org

> field? I find doing a cc: OR to: OR: bcc: thing to be really tedious.

Oh, that shouldn't be too hard. I'll take a look at this.

[Eric Larson]

Dirk-Jan C. Binnema <dj...@djcbsoftware.nl> writes:

> > - It did *AMAZING* work with formatting text in a way that seemed
> > appropriate... I could get emails from an airline with the different
> > bits of my itinerary's columns all lining up in a way that just
> > looked really stellar.
> > - It could do inline images
> > - Links were actual links, in that you could hover over the link and
> > hit enter and it would open it in the browser. I really miss that.
>
> Aha; that means using emacs' w3m mode, and using that as the viewer
> (that is different from using it for html->text, obviously).
>

I wanted to +1 on using w3m-mode for messages. I tried to figure it out
myself, but alas my elisp/emacs skills weren't up to the task.

Fwiw, here is what I use as my html2text command:

(setq mu4e-html2text-command "w3m -dump -cols 80 -T text/html")

I've been reasonably happy with it even though it doesn't always wrap
the lines. Thankfully, mu4e allows me to toggle wrapping with 'w' :)

Thanks!

Eric

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Eric writes:

> Fwiw, here is what I use as my html2text command:
>
> (setq mu4e-html2text-command "w3m -dump -cols 80 -T text/html")
>
> I've been reasonably happy with it even though it doesn't always wrap
> the lines. Thankfully, mu4e allows me to toggle wrapping with 'w' :)

Thanks for sharing that! This is pretty cool.

One major problem for me however is that links are "lost"... anything
enclosed in <a href="http://foo">blah</a> is lost to me.

This also makes me wonder: what's the chance that we'll get links that
work like

foo <- blue, underlined link

as opposed to the current mu4e option of

foo<http://example.org/foo/>[1]

I think I'd prefer the former if it became possible... though I doubt I
have the time to add support to that myself presently.

[Guilherme Gondim]

Dirk-Jan C. Binnema <dj...@djcbsoftware.nl> writes:

> A tool like procmail might be useful to move your work-emails to a
> certain folder, based on any field. One day, mu will have its own
> procmail, but alas, not yet.

Interesting! Support for labelling messages would be great! :-)


Another thing, I've been using the Github issues to suggest new
features, but I suppose will be better if I discuss they here.

Following is the issues I've opened in Github, so people from mailing
list can comment as well:

#41 mu4e: tag support in mu4e-header-names
https://github.com/djcb/mu/issues/41

#44 mu4e-compose: quote only marked region when replying
https://github.com/djcb/mu/issues/44


Thanks,

--
Guilherme Gondim (semente)

[Dirk-Jan C. Binnema]

On 2012-08-21 02:15, Guilherme Gondim wrote:

> Dirk-Jan C. Binnema <dj...@djcbsoftware.nl> writes:

> > A tool like procmail might be useful to move your work-emails to a
> > certain folder, based on any field. One day, mu will have its own
> > procmail, but alas, not yet.

> Interesting! Support for labelling messages would be great! :-)

Note, you can already do that with the existing procmail, using
'formail' to add/remove/update X-Label headers.

> Another thing, I've been using the Github issues to suggest new
> features, but I suppose will be better if I discuss they here.

> Following is the issues I've opened in Github, so people from mailing
> list can comment as well:

> #41 mu4e: tag support in mu4e-header-names
> https://github.com/djcb/mu/issues/41

> #44 mu4e-compose: quote only marked region when replying
> https://github.com/djcb/mu/issues/44

Noted, thanks.