Using Mew as a Mail Client

I’ve been looking for an email client to use but I’ve often been hesitant about it because more often than not, I still end up checking the web user interface. However, I’ve been using Emacs more often again and I’d rather be using that to compose my email and if ever I do have notes saved written in Planner mode, then it’s way easier to just do it within Emacs.

Mew's logo/splash screen

Mew is an email client you could use with Emacs. Emacs is a text editor with a lot of potential for extensibility. You could add a planner to it, an outliner and so much more. There is actually a number of email clients for Emacs but I chose Mew because it looks straightforward compared to Gnus.

Mew can be configured to download your mail via IMAP or POP. The manual shows you how to do things and if ever you’re doing this for the first time, it might be weird. Why? Because this is Emacs and there’s a way of doing things.

For starters, you need to Emacs 21.4 and later versions. It doesn’t make sense to use Mew without Emacs. Also, you need to download and install Mew. It’s in the Ubuntu repositories as well as in Fedora, apparently. So you could just probably use the application installer tool in these distros.

How to install it from scratch:

1. Download Mew’s source.
2. Extract the source.
3. In the directory of your soure, type ‘./configure’.
4. Type ‘make’.
5. Type ‘make install’.

Now it’s time to tell Emacs that you’re going to use Mew. If you already have a .emacs file, just add this line:
(mew)

That would automatically load Mew for you.

But before you even use Mew, you need to set up Mew first. You need a config file for it. Let’s call it .mew.el. Create a text file with that name. I will just share with you my .mew.el file in case you have a similar set up. I am using Google Apps, so basically this is a Gmail Account using a different domain name.


(setq mew-name "my name") ;; (user-full-name)
(setq mew-user "username") ;; (user-login-name)
(setq mew-mail-domain "domain.com")

;; Set using IMAP
(setq mew-proto “%”)
;; (setq mew-imap-user “your IMAP account”) ;; (user-login-name) ;; this has been commented out
(setq mew-imap-server “imap.gmail.com”) ;; if not localhost
(setq mew-imap-ssl t)
(setq mew-imap-ssl-port “993″)
(setq mew-imap-user “username@domain.com”)

;; send email via SMTP
(setq mew-smtp-server “smtp.gmail.com”) ;; if not localhost
(setq mew-smtp-ssl t)
(setq mew-smtp-ssl-port “587″)
(setq mew-smtp-port “587″)
(setq mew-smtp-user “username@domain.com”)
(setq mew-ssl-verify-level 0)
(setq mew-tls-smtp “smtp”)
(setq mew-smtp-auth-list ‘(”PLAIN” “LOGIN” “CRAM-MD5″))

;; cache the password
(setq mew-use-cached-passwd t) ;; so I won’t have to type the password all the time.

For the address book part, it’s easy. Just create a text file. called Addrbook in your Mew’s Mail directory. In my case it’s in ~/Mail. The text file is more or less like this per line:

eclair eclair@domain1.org, eclair@domain2.org eclair “Clair Ching”

This is how I set up my Mew account. At least it’s easier for me to send emails from Emacs. I am still looking at other things like searching email, etc.