Re: How to use `open` to handle `message:*` links on macOS

[Alexander Adolf]

Hello Tim,

Tim Visher <tim.visher@gmail.com> writes:

> [...]
> I do indeed trigger the capture by switching over to Emacs and whacking my
> org-capture keybinding (`C-c C`). I have a todo item that's been sitting in
> my list for a very long time to figure out how to move my email habits into
> emacs but I've never gotten around to it. In this case it's even worse
> because the only reason I'm using Mail.app in the first place is because my
> work email got moved to an Exchange server so I now don't have a good web
> based interface to read mail anymore like my beloved Gmail.
>
> One of these days though I'm going to break the habit and move email
> directly into Emacs. :)

I was in the exact same situation as you until about half a year ago,
which was when I decided to (finally) act on my "move email to emacs"
task.

Coincidentally I have recently released a blog post covering some of the
basic aspects of planning the switch:

                https://condition-alpha.com/blog/?p=1792

IMO, a decent amount up-front planning is crucial. With notmuch, emacs's
mail message handling infrastructure, and elisp, anything is possible;
the sky is the limit. Email is too central to our daily work to start
with the defaults and see where it takes you (IMO). So think well what
your dream email workflow is, and then work towards that.

The smallest, and most isolated task is perhaps configuring msmtp for
sending mail; so why not start with that?

Importing existing mailboxes (from Apple's mail app in my case), is
another important issue (which I'll cover in a future blog post).

Once you've imported some mail, you can toy around with notmuch in
emacs, and the settings, until you get a gist of how things work, and
how far you are from your goal. Your everyday real work is still in
Apple's mail app.

Once you're confident that you'll be able to survive with your emacs
setup, then you can make the move, and stop using Apple's mail app.

If you start a big all-in-one migration, and it fails, you're left with
a big mess. Thus, doing things step-by-step with an option to revert
each step if it doesn't work, is crucial, too.


Hoping to have helped,

  --alexander