*** DONE My Preferred Business Email Setup With Thunderbird and Notmuch (and Why it Doesn't Work) :blog:software:emails:rant:
CLOSED: [2020-06-04 Thu 21:08]
:PROPERTIES:
:CREATED: [2020-06-04 Thu 20:30]
:ID: 2020-06-04-firefox-maildir
:END:
:LOGBOOK:
- State "DONE"       from "NEXT"       [2020-06-04 Thu 21:08]
:END:

This is a software rant article on an email setup for business use and
why [[https://www.thunderbird.net/][Thunderbird]] prevents me from using it like that.

First, lets start with some requirements for my business email setup.

**** Requirements

I'm old-school and need to run my email setup on my own computer and
not a web-based one like Google provides with GMail where no email is
stored on my computer.

Using an [[id:tags-emacs][Emacs]]-based email client or [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_client][mail user agent (MUA)]] has many
advantages for somebody [[id:2018-01-26-orgmode][using Org mode]] all day long. Linking to emails
within my notes is easy, composing emails within Emacs provides a
decent editor, even composing decent HTML emails [[https://github.com/jeremy-compostella/org-msg][is easily done using
Org mode]], and so forth.

I'd love to use an Emacs-based email setup like [[https://notmuchmail.org/][notmuch]]. It's
tag-based which allows for multi-classification. Using this, I might
play around with various workflows that are not possible in a
classic MUA.

Unfortunately, in business life you need to be able to use a graphical
MUA that is able to create and handle appointment invitations
properly. Currently, my business device is running GNU/Linux. This is
why I need to run Thunderbird in any case.

Occasionally, I need to encrypt and/or sign emails using [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#OpenPGP][the OpenPGP
standard]].

**** The Email Setup I Want to Have

Running multiple MUA in parallel in a naïve way would result in having
to store all emails multiple times: Thunderbird is downloading emails
to its local storage and some kind of IMAP-fetcher (like [[http://isync.sourceforge.net/][isync]]) is
fetching emails to a different local email storage.

When it comes to storage formats for emails, there are two standard
formats: the good old [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox][mbox]] and the more modern [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir][Maildir]] format.

According to [[https://notmuchmail.org/howto/][the notmuch FAQs]], the Maildir storage format is the way
to go for notmuch setups. This is how I came up with the following
setup plan:

#+CAPTION: Desired email setup with unified Maildir holding the emails.
#+ATTR_HTML: :align center :width 630 :linked-image-width original
[[tsfile:2020-06-04 Email setup with Thunderbird and other MUAs sharing same Maildir -- scan publicvoit.png][2020-06-04 Email setup with Thunderbird and other MUAs sharing same Maildir -- scan publicvoit.png]]

**** The Reality Check

By default, Thunderbird is storing its emails in an mbox format.
However, I found [[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/Maildir][this]] and [[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/maildir-thunderbird][that]] page that explained how to switch
Thunderbird to Maildir format. There are some warnings attached: it's
not a standard Maildir. I thought I'd give it a try.

Unfortunately, I had to find out that the warnings are there for a
reason. [[id:2020-01-13-thunderbird-notmuch][Thunderbird's Maildir implementation is that different from
standard Maildir]] that I ended up with two separate sets of emails
mixed in one sub-hierarchy when using isync and Thunderbird to fetch
emails. Furthermore, Thunderbird can not access emails in a standard
Maildir storage.

This was quite a show-stopper for my original plan. According to this,
Thunderbird needs its own email storage in any case:

#+CAPTION: Possible email setup with Thunderbird having its own email storage.
#+ATTR_HTML: :alt alterantive-text for the image
#+ATTR_HTML: :align center :width 630 :linked-image-width original
[[tsfile:2020-06-04 Email setup with Thunderbird and other MUAs fetching emails in parallel -- scan publicvoit.png][2020-06-04 Email setup with Thunderbird and other MUAs fetching emails in parallel -- scan publicvoit.png]]

**** My Current Setup

My private email setup is unchanged since decades: a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutt_(email_client)][mutt]] that runs
directly on my mail server within a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tmux][tmux]]-session. That's not part of
this article.

The business setup I'm using at the moment consists of a simple
Thunderbird. I had to forget any other MUA experiment since I did not
want to deal with two different email storages.

For linking emails, I've found [[https://github.com/mikehardy/thunderlink][thunderlink]] which does the trick. When
reading an email, I might press =Ctrl-Shift-1= and a formatted
message-ID link gets put into my clipboard I might paste somewhere
else.

Thunderbird has some minor flaws here and there but is OKish.