My ideal email setup would be to forego mutt and just have all of my email on the local file system as files.

Maildir is really close to this, except the messages still have that ridiculous encoding with an equal sign or the bodies are base64 encoded depending on how they're MIMEd.

Thinking about how that might work, this part is pretty clear:

┌─────────┐ ┌────────┐ ┌───────────────────┐

│ Maildir │◁┄┄writes mail┄┤ mbsync ├┄┄fetches┄┄▷│ protonmail-bridge │

└─────────┘ └────────┘ └───────────────────┘

△ △ △

┆ ┆ ┆

indexes triggers monitors

┆ ┆ ┆

┌─────────┐ ┌────┴─────────┐ ┆

│ notmuch │◁┄┄┄triggers┄┄┤ goimapnotify ├┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┘

└─────────┘ └──────────────┘

I think after I get this part working, I can try to just use Neovim for reading mail. It will still have goofy encodings, but I'll be closer to my goal at least.

I'm not sure about sending mail yet. Perhaps just T383838sendmail via Postfix.

If I use Neovim for writing messages, I can still use abook for addresses, and calcurses for the calendar, and none of that would really change much. Maybe I should start looking at T383838notmuch-vim plugins.

Tags: index, protonmail, notmuch, cli

created: 2025-01-26

(re)generated: 2026-07-17