mu4e v0.9.9 is out!

I few months ago, I introduced mu4e, a modest little emacs mail client that I wrote. It seems many people picked it up, great!

what's new?

I have just released mu/mu4e version 0.9.9. There are quite a few changes, both user-visible and 'under-the-hood'. I've also spent some time on improving the manual (pdf), and I'm quite happy about it.

Some of the more visible new things in mu4e are:

• Support for crypto (decrypting messages, signing them)
• Support for refiling (like mutt, Wanderlust)
• Dynamic folders (instead of hard-coding the sent/draft/trash/refile folder, they can be functions that return different folders based on the message we're dealing with, see the example below)
• Same for the folder to save attachments
• A lot of smaller and bigger UI improvements

Also, the core mu program has seen a lot of improvements (many of which directly improve mu4e as well)

• Better support for non-ascii locales / character sets, such as ISO-2022-JP
• Improved on-line help ('mu help ...')
• Performance improvements for threaded display (~ 25% for 23K messages)

For a more complete list, see NEWS.

dynamic folders

As mentioned, mu4e now supports dynamic folders. Before, you'd set your trash folder to some static string:

(setq mu4e-trash-folder "/trash")

In some cases, you may want to have a bit more flexibility – for example, have a separate trash-folder (or sent-folder, drafts-folder, refile-folder) for private mail and work mail. You can now do something like:

(setq mu4e-trash-folder
  (lambda (msg)
    (if (and msg ;; msg may be nil
          (mu4e-message-contact-field-matches msg :to "me@work.com"))
      "/trash-work"
      "/trash")))

refiling

After I have dealt with some e-mail, I either delete it or move it to some archive folder – refiling. For this, there is now the r keybinding, and mu4e-refile-folder; and a place where dynamic folders really shine:

(setq mu4e-refile-folder
  (lambda (msg)
    (cond
      ;; messages to the mu mailing list go to the /mu folder
      ((mu4e-message-contact-field-matches msg :to
         "mu-discuss@googlegroups.com")
        "/mu")
      ;; messages sent directly to me go to /archive
      ;; also `mu4e-user-mail-address-regexp' can be used
      ((mu4e-message-contact-field-matches msg :to "me@example.com")
        "/private")
      ;; messages with football or soccer in the subject go to /football
      ((string-match "football\\|soccer" (or (mu4e-message-field msg :subject) ""))
        "/football")
      ;; everything else goes to /archive
      ;; important to have a catch-all at the end!
      (t "/archive"))))

How cool is that? After reading my inbox folder, I select all messages (C-x h), press r, and they're all moved to the right refiling folder.

crypto support

mu4e already supported signing/encrypting messages, but now it supports decryption and verifying signatures as well. This was one of the most requested new features. I think it is still a bit rough, but it has been working very well for me.

so…

I think version 0.9.9 is a great new step for mu4e. It already goes far beyond I ever planned to do. I received a lot of suggestions for new features, which is great! I'm not planning to implement all of those, but I will try to make mu4e even more programmable – it should be easy to augment mu4e with your own little elisp-snippets – the Barbapapa principle of software, already so clearly present in emacs itself.