• mu4e alert
  • What is this?
  • Requirements
  • Installation
    • ELPA
    • El-get
  • Usage
  • Customizations
    • General options
    • Customizing the desktop notifications
    • Customizing the mode-line display
  • Getting desktop notifications
    • Linux
    • Mac OSX
  • Advanced customizations

mu4e-alert is an Emacs extension providing desktop notifications for mu4e, additionally it can display the number of unread emails in the mode-line.

This package requires Emacs v24.1 or above. It assumes that you have a working mu/mu4e setup. Additionally it requires the program wc and that the user shell to support pipe (|) operator, this should not be a problem on any UNIXy system (including Mac OSX).

However it might not work on Windows unless you have something like cygwin installed. Pull requests to improve Windows support are welcome.

mu4e-alert is available on MELPA and MELPA Stable. Please follow the instructions on MELPA website to enable it, if you haven’t already.

You can then install mu4e-alert from the package menu. Alternatively install it by doing the following

Refresh the package index

M-x package-refresh-contents RET

And then install it by doing

M-x package-install RET mu4e-alert

mu4e-alert can also be installed using el-get. Assuming you have latest version of el-get installing it by doing something similar to

M-x el-get-install RET mu4e-alert

To enable desktop notifications manually, use the command mu4e-alert-enable-notifications. To enable notification automatically on Emacs startup add something like the following to your init file

;; Choose the style you prefer for desktop notifications
;; If you are on Linux you can use
;; 1. notifications - Emacs lisp implementation of the Desktop Notifications API
;; 2. libnotify     - Notifications using the `notify-send' program, requires `notify-send' to be in PATH
;;
;; On Mac OSX you can set style to
;; 1. notifier      - Notifications using the `terminal-notifier' program, requires `terminal-notifier' to be in PATH
;; 1. growl         - Notifications using the `growl' program, requires `growlnotify' to be in PATH
(mu4e-alert-set-default-style 'libnotify)
(add-hook 'after-init-hook #'mu4e-alert-enable-notifications)

mu4e-alert uses the value of alert-default-style as the default notification style, which defaults to message, if you want to use different style please add a rule for category “mu4e-alert” using alert’s API or use the function mu4e-alert-set-default-style to customize the value of mu4e-alert-style.

You can disable notifications using the command mu4e-alert-disable-notifications

You can additionally enable display of the unread email count in the mode-line using the command mu4e-alert-enable-mode-line-display or adding something like the following to your init file

(add-hook 'after-init-hook #'mu4e-alert-enable-mode-line-display)

After enabling mode-line display the unread emails can be viewed by clicking the mode-line indicator.

Use the command mu4e-alert-disable-mode-line-display to disable mode-line indication of unread emails

mu4e-alert should work with default options, nevertheless it offers the following customizations. Please see the mu4e-alert.el file or do M-x customize-group RET mu4e-alert RET to for documentation of customizable options.

The query used to find unread (read ‘interesting’) emails can be customized using the variable mu4e-alert-interesting-mail-query

mu4e-alert allows you to customize the desktop notifications by setting the following values

The mode-line indicator for unread emails can be customized by setting the value of the variable mu4e-alert-modeline-formatter

By default the user is notified of unread messages using Emacs’ message function. To get desktop notifications you can instruct mu4e-alert to use an appropriate style provided by the alert library that works on your system.

The easiest way to do this is use the function mu4e-alert-set-default-style, calling it with the style to be used for notifications

The styles available vary according to the OS

The following styles for desktop notifications, are available on Linux

This style uses notifications.el an implementation of the Desktop Notifications API, which ships with Emacs. It requires that Emacs is compiled with DBus support

This style uses the command-line program notify-send to notify the user. The program should be in PATH

The following styles for desktop notifications, are available on Mac OSX. Also see the discussion on the issue Does it works with MacOS X?

This style uses the command-line program growlnotify to notify the user using Growl. The program should be in PATH

This style uses the command-line program terminal-notifier to notify the user. The program should be in PATH

mu4e-alert uses the excellent alert library for desktop notifications, more fine-grained customizations to the notifications can be done by using the alert’s API.

As an example the following customization will color the fringe (along with the usual desktop notification) if there are unread messages and the user is visiting one of mu4e-main-view, mu4e-headers-view or viewing an email in mu4e.

(mu4e-alert-set-default-style 'libnotify)
(alert-add-rule :category "mu4e-alert" :style 'fringe :predicate (lambda (_) (string-match-p "^mu4e-" (symbol-name major-mode))) :continue t)
(mu4e-alert-enable-notifications)