how to use vim to manage and send emails

Question

I would like to use vim/gvim as tool for mail managent and I found these 2 interesting pages.

claws

vmail

I understood that these suffer from the following limitations

1. with vmail you can see and manager all past mails, but it works only with GMAIL accounts, not any other mail account like the outkook ones.

2. with claws you can use vim/gvim just as an editor for mails you want to create; I am not sure whether that is possible to read past mails (staying in the same vim environment) or search them.

Do you know a good plugin that allow vim to do everything you would do with any mail client? That would include search past mails, sort them and view them, label

Answer 1

Check out notmuch-vim. I, like you, love vim and like to use programs with similar bindings but haven't really found anything suitable. However, I'm blown away by notmuch-vim and like it better than any email client I've used in the past. I've used mutt a lot and also short runs with various GUI clients. I like it so much I started improving the interface for it to round out the rough edges. Here's the good parts:

• notmuch focuses on searches rather than mailboxes. You can define a bunch of predefined searches that are presented on the main page. It's all very intuitive and lets you read the emails you need to and ignore the rest.
• The search facility is very powerful, full msg searching, tagging etc.
• The vim interface is actually great. You can use all the vim native searching, moving etc while viewing emails.

The only real downside is the set up. You have to set up something like offlineimap to grab email and then sendmail to send email. However, this means that eg full body searching is nearly instantaneous as all the mail is locally stored.

I've been working on adding attachment support. url opening etc. and it's working great.

Oh, and never mind this vim is a text editor stuff.. vim is expanding continuously and if it meets your needs, run with it.

Answer 2

Vim is a text editor; it can handle the part of editing emails very well, and it ships with the mail filetype, which provides some syntax highlighting and special settings.

There are various ways to integrate Vim with email applications; terminal-based tools like mutt can be configured to use an external editor, and there are add-ons like External Editor for the popular Thunderbird email client, to name just a few.

I don't see how Vim would help with managing email; all its functions are meant for processing text, not email-like structures. You could probably write some kind of toolset that persists emails as individual files, and then integrate search with Vim through a custom 'grepprg', but I honestly don't see the benefit.