{"slug": "mu4e", "name": "mu4e", "category": "communication", "category_name": "Email and chat", "description": "", "recommenders": 1, "commenters": 7, "warners": 1, "score": 1.299, "rising": -0.33, "first": "2025-12-10", "latest": "2026-08-08", "why": "", "why_is_quote": false, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 5, "compare": 0, "warn": 1}, "spark": [0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0], "listed": false, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "", "icon": false, "domain": null, "github_repo": null, "official_url": "", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["mu4e"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 739505537, "item_id": 46219096, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46219096", "by": "tmtvl", "date": "2025-12-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it's been working well for years now", "excerpt": "I use isync (mbsync), mu, and Emacs for my e-mail needs and it work fine. Both isync and mu4e needed a bit of configuration (and Emacs itself needed one change to stop automatically breaking lines), but it's been working well for years now. I previously used Thunderbird but its editor was garbage, so then I tried a few things (neomutt and I believe something called alpine or something like that) before settling on Em", "context": "", "use_case": "email in Emacs", "switched_from": "Thunderbird", "story": "Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e"}]}], "caveats": [], "who": [{"by": "jwr", "context": "macOS user", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46215374", "date": "2025-12-10"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["email", "email in emacs", "reading mail locally", "reading feeds and email", "read email in emacs"], "compared": [{"slug": "thunderbird", "name": "Thunderbird", "co": 3, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "apple-mail", "name": "Apple Mail", "co": 1, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "notmuch", "name": "notmuch", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "emacs", "name": "Emacs", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "gnus", "name": "Gnus", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46140579", "title": "Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e", "mentions": 4}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49216638", "title": "Ask HN: If you had to relearn Emacs today, how would you?", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492533", "title": "Software Is Made Between Commits", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46772655", "title": "Ask HN: Who do you follow via RSS feed?", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {"neutral": 2, "warn": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-01": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 787619123, "item_id": 49226195, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49226195", "by": "dannymi", "date": "2026-08-08", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "for email (mu4e)", "excerpt": "It really depends on what your character is. I like to start from the basics and build up. I would start from a completely vanilla emacs (on package emacs-pgtk--that is the graphical version), then enable Options > Cut/Paste with C-x/C-c/C-v CUA mode, then Options > Save Options. I like and use Emacs, but it is showing its age. The defaults are all bad--but the possible end result you CAN configure is pretty modern [", "context": "", "use_case": "email", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: If you had to relearn Emacs today, how would you?"}, {"id": 775905091, "item_id": 48494068, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48494068", "by": "skydhash", "date": "2026-06-11", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "fdm/mu4e (to have them locally)", "excerpt": "I use OpenBSD as a daily driver (but could use Alpine or VoidLinux too) and my setup is pretty much silent. No notifications, no rainbows of colors, no glitz. Let\u2019s take mail. I use a combination of mutt hto directly connect via imap) and fdm/mu4e (to have them locally). I\u201dm not interested in having counters or notifications for any of those. The \u201ccalm technology\u201d book has an handful of advices, but one of the best e", "context": "", "use_case": "reading mail locally", "switched_from": "", "story": "Software Is Made Between Commits"}, {"id": 748529828, "item_id": 46783114, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46783114", "by": "chriswarbo", "date": "2026-01-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "read them in email clients (Thunderbird, KMail, Emacs+Gnus, Emacs+mu4e, etc.)", "excerpt": "> Funny enough the only time I used rss was when I had that cool outlook integration that made them seem like emails. I convert feeds to maildir, and read them in email clients (Thunderbird, KMail, Emacs+Gnus, Emacs+mu4e, etc.). That lets me use the same setup for emails and feeds; keeping them on a network mount makes sync trivial; etc. I use http://www.chriswarbo.net/git/feed2maildir which is a fork of https://gith", "context": "", "use_case": "reading feeds and email", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who do you follow via RSS feed?"}, {"id": 739562433, "item_id": 46222652, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46222652", "by": "heintje_ghulam", "date": "2025-12-10", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "download email that I then read with mu4e", "excerpt": "I use offlineimap3 (https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap3) to download email that I then read with mu4e. To make it work with my email provider I need to place a cert_fingerprint value in the .offlineimaprc configuration file. This used to change once a year, but now the value changes every 47 days (https://www.digicert.com/blog/tls-certificate-lifetimes-will-officially-reduce-to-47-days). Has anyone figured ou", "context": "", "use_case": "read email in Emacs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e"}, {"id": 739505537, "item_id": 46219096, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46219096", "by": "tmtvl", "date": "2025-12-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it's been working well for years now", "excerpt": "I use isync (mbsync), mu, and Emacs for my e-mail needs and it work fine. Both isync and mu4e needed a bit of configuration (and Emacs itself needed one change to stop automatically breaking lines), but it's been working well for years now. I previously used Thunderbird but its editor was garbage, so then I tried a few things (neomutt and I believe something called alpine or something like that) before settling on Em", "context": "", "use_case": "email in Emacs", "switched_from": "Thunderbird", "story": "Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e"}, {"id": 739484416, "item_id": 46217776, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46217776", "by": "komali2", "date": "2025-12-10", "stance": "warn", "quote": "", "excerpt": "I was in this world for like 8 years but switched to Thunderbird after one too many emails didn't send because I missed some notification or something in mu4e, and too many emails weren't rendering well in Emacs, and etc little problems that cropped up. I needed my email to Just Work, not be another aspect of my procrastination machi- sorry I mean, my IDE.", "context": "used it for about 8 years", "use_case": "email", "switched_from": "", "story": "Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e"}, {"id": 739445986, "item_id": 46215374, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46215374", "by": "jwr", "date": "2025-12-10", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I'm trying to find some time to try mu4e.", "excerpt": "Thanks, keeping this as a reference \u2014 I'm trying to find some time to try mu4e. I used Gnus for many years, then switched to Apple Mail.app, but with the gradual decline of MacOS (and Mail.app) I'm looking to switch back. I remember the two main reasons I switched from Gnus: 1) there was no good reliable search, 2) I couldn't drag&drop attachments into E-mails and back so I was spending a lot of time pointing to file", "context": "macOS user", "use_case": "email in Emacs", "switched_from": "Apple Mail", "story": "Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e"}]}