Self Hosted Open Formats For The Win

April 9, 2015 - Scott Hewitt


Last night after completing the frequent task of applying application and system updates I discovered that notmuch mode within emacs which I use to read email was broken.

Now you might expect this to be a rant about package management on Linux systems, or Ubuntu in general but that is not the case as I allow Ubuntu to manage notmuch, offlineimap and emacs. While I use emacs MELPA to manage notmuch mode within emacs. SO expecting two different package management systems to allows get it right when they don’t talk to each other is a little much to ask.

So returning to the problem I found myself unable to read my hosted email. I was about to login via the web interface, which would solve the reading problem, give me a horrific web interface to work with and the problem of maintaining the sent mail record when I realised that even though notmuch much was broken, offlineimap was working just fine. A great endorsement of the *nix method small programs doing one thing well and also the advantage to open formats. Consequently I quickly installed Mutt through apt-get pointed it at my local mail boxes and was sorted.

Now it still leaves me with a broken notmuch mode with emacs which I hope will get fixed by a future update. However, to be honest I am considering just sticking with mutt as it resolves the meta key iOS bluetooth problem, but thats an entire blog post in its self.