C.3 Reading messages

C.3.1 Opening messages is slower than expected - why?

mu4e is designed to be very fast, even with large amounts of mail. However, if you experience slowdowns, here are some things to consider:

If you still experience unexpected slowness, you can of course file a ticket, but please be sure to mention the following:

C.3.2 How can I word-wrap long lines in when viewing a message?

You can toggle between wrapped and non-wrapped states using w. If you want to do this automatically, invoke visual-line-mode in your mu4e-view-rendered-hook (mu4e-view-mode-hook fires too early).

C.3.3 How can I perform custom actions on messages and attachments?

See Actions.

C.3.4 How can I prevent mu4e from automatically marking messages as ‘read’ when I read them?

Set mu4e-view-auto-mark-as-read to nil.

C.3.6 There seems to be a lot of duplicate messages — how can I get rid of them?

See Skipping duplicates.

C.3.7 Some messages are almost unreadable in emacs — can I view them in an external web browser?

Indeed, airlines often send messages that heavily depend on html and are hard to digest inside emacs. Fortunately, there’s an action (Message view actions) defined for this. Simply add to your configuration:

(add-to-list 'mu4e-view-actions
  '("ViewInBrowser" . mu4e-action-view-in-browser) t)

Now, when viewing such a difficult message, type aV, and the message opens inside a web browser. You can influence the browser to use with browse-url-generic-program.

C.3.8 How can I read encrypted messages that I sent?

Since you do not own the recipient’s key you typically cannot read those mails — so the trick is to encrypt outgoing mails with your key, too. This can be automated by adding the following snippet to your configuration (courtesy of user kpachnis):

(require 'epg-config)
(setq mml2015-use 'epg
      epg-user-id "gpg_key_id"
      mml2015-encrypt-to-self t
      mml2015-sign-with-sender t)