Mike Zamansky has another video up in his Using Emacs Series. This time it’s about the Notmuch email client and how it compares to mu4e. Zamansky uses mu4e for his work email and Gmail for his personal email but decided he’d like to do all his email chores from Emacs. It’s pretty easy to set up mu4e to work with Gmail but Zamansky thought he’d look into the Notmuch client to see if he liked it better than mu4e.

They’re actually pretty similar except for how they organize your emails. Mu4e puts your emails in folders. That’s not as onerous as it might sound. Both Zamansky and I basically just use Inbox, Archive, and Trash folders to hold everything. Notmuch uses tags instead so if you want to save a particular email, you’d just tag it with ARCHIVE. You can, of course, use any tag(s) you like so it’s easy to organize your mail. As with mu4e, you locate emails with the powerful Xapian-based search functionality they both provide.

Although I love mu4e and have no plans or desire to change, there are folks who are just as passionate about Nomuch. Many of them tried mu4e first so their preference is not just “it’s what I use so it’s best.” The use of tags is a very nice feature and a powerful way of handling your email. You can, of course, use the tags to essentially replicate mu4e’s folder system if you like to organize your email that way but ever since I read Ben Maughan’s post on how he handles email with mu4e by keeping everything in a single archive folder, I’ve been a big believer in that method. I don’t need to use brain cells trying to decide which folder to store an email in. I just put them all in the same place and rely on the mu4e’s powerful search capability to find them when I need them.

So what did Zamansky decide? He says he likes Notmuch a little bit better but in the end his choice came down to a mundane pragmatic issue. Watch the video to see what it was. The video is 19 minutes, 40 seconds long so plan accordingly. As always with Zamansky’s videos, it’s well worth the time.