GettingMail

This page describes how to retrieve and read email from within Emacs.

Getting mail

Note: Some clients delete your mail from the server after downloading it. If you want to keep your mail on the server, you must tell your client to preserve it.

Rmail

Here’s an example of an Rmail configuration:

(setq
  rmail-primary-inbox-list '("pop://me%40example.com@mail.example.com")
  rmail-preserve-inbox t
  user-full-name "Funky Turtle"
  user-mail-address "me@example.com")

Gnus

Here’s an example of Gnus using the ‘nnml’ backend with POP:

(setq
  gnus-secondary-select-methods '((nnml ""))
  mail-sources '((pop :server "pop.example.com"
                      :user   "me@example.com")))

MH-E

An example of MH-E using POP:

#: In ~/.mh_profile
Path: mail
inc: -host mail.example.com -user me@example.com

Speeding Things Up

Emacs freezes up during sending / receiving if Emacs does it itself, so if you are downloading large emails, you will be unable to do multitasking. It may be a better idea to use another program like mpop to retrieve mail.

mpop

Instead of making Emacs retrieve your mail, you can run a program like ‘mpop’ outside of Emacs to download new mail to a folder, before managing it from inside Emacs.

The mpop config file is in ~/.mpop and looks like this:

defaults
tls  on
keep on

account  default
host     mail.example.com
port     995
user     alex@example.com
password p4ssw0rd
delivery maildir "~/mail"

Running mpop from the commandline fetches your mail and moves it into the inbox you provided.

For sending mail via SMTP, msmtp was written by the same author, and is a popular alternative to sendmail.

Other Tips

Emacs doesn’t know which mail client you prefer, but you can tell it by setting the ‘read-mail-command’ variable:

;; If you're using rmail
(setq read-mail-command 'rmail)

;; Or if you're using Gnus:
(setq read-mail-command 'gnus)

;; Or MH-E:
(setq read-mail-command 'mh-nmail)

There’s a corresponding variable for writing mail: ‘mail-user-agent’, which tells Emacs which “compose” window should appear when you activate a “Mailto” link:

;; If you prefer rmail
(setq mail-user-agent 'sendmail-user-agent)

;; Or GNUS
(setq mail-user-agent 'gnus-user-agent)

;; Or MH-E
(setq mail-user-agent 'mh-e-user-agent)

See Also


CategoryMail