B.3.1 Setting up offlineimap ¶

First of all, we need a program to get the e-mail from Gmail to our local machine; for this we use offlineimap; on Debian (and derivatives like Ubuntu), this is as easy as:

$ sudo apt-get install offlineimap

while on Fedora (and similar) you need:

$ sudo yum install offlineimap

Then, we can configure offlineimap by editing ~/.offlineimaprc:

[general]
accounts = Gmail
maxsyncaccounts = 3

[Account Gmail]
localrepository = Local
remoterepository = Remote

[Repository Local]
type = Maildir
localfolders = ~/Maildir

[Repository Remote]
type = IMAP
remotehost = imap.gmail.com
remoteuser = USERNAME@gmail.com
remotepass = PASSWORD
ssl = yes
maxconnections = 1

Obviously, you need to replace USERNAME and PASSWORD with your actual Gmail username and password. After this, you should be able to download your mail:

$ offlineimap
 OfflineIMAP 6.3.4
Copyright 2002-2011 John Goerzen & contributors.
Licensed under the GNU GPL v2+ (v2 or any later version).

Account sync Gmail:
 ***** Processing account Gmail
 Copying folder structure from IMAP to Maildir
 Establishing connection to imap.gmail.com:993.
Folder sync [Gmail]:
 Syncing INBOX: IMAP -> Maildir
 Syncing [Gmail]/All Mail: IMAP -> Maildir
 Syncing [Gmail]/Drafts: IMAP -> Maildir
 Syncing [Gmail]/Sent Mail: IMAP -> Maildir
 Syncing [Gmail]/Spam: IMAP -> Maildir
 Syncing [Gmail]/Starred: IMAP -> Maildir
 Syncing [Gmail]/Trash: IMAP -> Maildir
Account sync Gmail:
 ***** Finished processing account Gmail

We can now run mu to make sure things work:

$ mu index
mu: indexing messages under /home/foo/Maildir [/home/foo/.cache/mu/xapian]
| processing mail; checked: 520; updated/new: 520, cleaned-up: 0
mu: elapsed: 3 second(s), ~ 173 msg/s
mu: cleaning up messages [/home/foo/.cache/mu/xapian]
/ processing mail; checked: 520; updated/new: 0, cleaned-up: 0
mu: elapsed: 0 second(s)

We can run both the offlineimap and the mu index from within mu4e, but running it from the command line makes it a bit easier to troubleshoot as we are setting things up.

Note: when using encryption, you probably do not want to synchronize your Drafts-folder, since it contains the unencrypted messages. You can use OfflineIMAP’s folderfilter for that.

B.3.2 Settings ¶

Next step: let’s make a mu4e configuration for this:

(require 'mu4e)

;; use mu4e for e-mail in emacs
(setq mail-user-agent 'mu4e-user-agent)

(setq mu4e-drafts-folder "/[Gmail].Drafts")
(setq mu4e-sent-folder   "/[Gmail].Sent Mail")
(setq mu4e-trash-folder  "/[Gmail].Trash")

;; don't save message to Sent Messages, Gmail/IMAP takes care of this
(setq mu4e-sent-messages-behavior 'delete)

;; (See the documentation for `mu4e-sent-messages-behavior' if you have
;; additional non-Gmail addresses and want assign them different
;; behavior.)

;; setup some handy shortcuts
;; you can quickly switch to your Inbox -- press ``ji''
;; then, when you want archive some messages, move them to
;; the 'All Mail' folder by pressing ``ma''.

(setq mu4e-maildir-shortcuts
    '( (:maildir "/INBOX"              :key ?i)
       (:maildir "/[Gmail].Sent Mail"  :key ?s)
       (:maildir "/[Gmail].Trash"      :key ?t)
       (:maildir "/[Gmail].All Mail"   :key ?a)))

(add-to-list 'mu4e-bookmarks
    ;; ':favorite t' i.e, use this one for the modeline
   '(:query "maildir:/inbox" :name "Inbox" :key ?i :favorite t))

;; allow for updating mail using 'U' in the main view:
(setq mu4e-get-mail-command "offlineimap")

;; something about ourselves
(setq
   user-mail-address "USERNAME@gmail.com"
   user-full-name  "Foo X. Bar"
   message-signature
    (concat
      "Foo X. Bar\n"
      "http://www.example.com\n"))

;; sending mail -- replace USERNAME with your gmail username
;; also, make sure the gnutls command line utils are installed
;; package 'gnutls-bin' in Debian/Ubuntu

(require 'smtpmail)
(setq message-send-mail-function 'smtpmail-send-it
   starttls-use-gnutls t
   smtpmail-starttls-credentials '(("smtp.gmail.com" 587 nil nil))
   smtpmail-auth-credentials
     '(("smtp.gmail.com" 587 "USERNAME@gmail.com" nil))
   smtpmail-default-smtp-server "smtp.gmail.com"
   smtpmail-smtp-server "smtp.gmail.com"
   smtpmail-smtp-service 587)

;; alternatively, for emacs-24 you can use:
;;(setq message-send-mail-function 'smtpmail-send-it
;;     smtpmail-stream-type 'starttls
;;     smtpmail-default-smtp-server "smtp.gmail.com"
;;     smtpmail-smtp-server "smtp.gmail.com"
;;     smtpmail-smtp-service 587)

;; don't keep message buffers around
(setq message-kill-buffer-on-exit t)

And that’s it — put the above in your emacs initialization file, change USERNAME etc. to your own, restart Emacs, and run M-x mu4e.