I recently started using mu4e exclusively for emails. I haven't opened the browser based email client in more than a week.

I almost never use “rich text” emails, so I didn't miss sending “rich” emails much.

But sometimes it is nice (useful?) to make certain word(s) bold for the impact.

and if one is using “rich text”, marking code/commands in fixed width font is always nice. I always used to manually change the font in such cases, when using browser based email client.

Since my needs were relatively low, using org-mode's mark-up was sufficient.

To quickly summarize, how I was able to do that, here are the steps :

(Note : My keybindings are spacemacs default. They may be different for you)

  • Start new email using “C”
  • After entering to/subject etc, and switching to body section, do org-mu4e-compose-org-mode
  • Write email using org mode. When done, org-mime-htmlize
  • Switch to headers area (This may not be needed, but I read reports somewhere that attempting to send email when in “body” part leads to some errors)
  • Send using C-c C-c

During my first few “Test” emails, I (naturally) tried bullets, sub-bullets (like one expects to have in an org file)

This caused emails with TOC, and section numbers. It might be OK (even desirable) when exporting an org-mode file to HTML file. But in an email, that looks “odd”

This was easily cured by adding #+OPTIONS: toc:nil num:nil to the “email body”

But I don't want to (remember to) add this each time I want “rich text” email.

So these were created as global (?) settings in my .spacemacs file as follows :

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(setq org-export-with-section-numbers nil)
(setq org-export-with-toc nil)

You can read about other export related settings here

I did run into a little problem (still unresolved as of this writing) See this reddit thread

Update : July 6th, 2017

I found a workaround, that “works for me, for now”

Instead of #+BEGIN_SRC if I use #+BEGIN_EXAMPLE - I don't get “bad characters”

Off course, no syntax highlighting, but at least for my use cases - I didn't need it

More over, if I were using standard browser-based email client, I do not get syntax highlighting any way.

The email (bodies) were never meant to share “code snippets”