Soliciting Recommendations for a Mail Client

Soliciting Recommendations for a Mail Client

[Peter Jones]

Hopefully I won't start a flame war...

I've been using mutt for a bit over 10 years now, but I'm feeling the
irresistible pull to deeper integrate my life with Emacs.

I'm sure that there are plenty of people on this list that would love
to recommend their Emacs-based MUA to me, so please go for it.

My mail currently comes in via sendmail, which then uses maildrop as
the delivery agent.  Maildrop filters my mail and then drops it into
one of several Maildir directories in ~/mail.

I'm hoping to find something that works with my existing delivery
setup, since I also sometimes use IMAP externally.  I'd be using Emacs
local to the MTA and MDA, however.

Thanks!

-- 
Peter Jones
http://pmade.com

Re: Soliciting Recommendations for a Mail Client

[Bill O'Connor]

Peter Jones <mlists@pmade.com> writes:

> Hopefully I won't start a flame war...
>
> I've been using mutt for a bit over 10 years now, but I'm feeling the
> irresistible pull to deeper integrate my life with Emacs.
>

Well, that shouldn't start a flame war here.  :)

I've been using Gnus for 20 years, I have no complaints.  No idea how to
use it, but no complaints.  ;)

Re: Soliciting Recommendations for a Mail Client

[Timothy Hobbs]

I use gnus as well, in congruence with BBDB and planner-mode.  It works well,
though there are a lot of things I don't understand.  It is not an emacs like
program in that instead of having a quick clean api and front end, it has a
huge, power full, complex tangle, with it's own specialized extension
mechanisms.  This I typically think is a bad thing.  But no one has gotten
around to really replacing it.  I have managed to change the key bindings and
mess up the window lay out to the point where it was deemed acceptable by me, so
therefore it can't be too bad, right?

One thing, it is the one part of emacs that really requires you to restart after
making significant config changes.  You can save yourself lots of time by
reading the docs really well before setting up anything, because it's kind of a
monster about creating lots and lots of dot files, and not liking to be *re*
configured.

Good luck
Timothy Hobbs

Re: Soliciting Recommendations for a Mail Client

[Reiner Steib]

On Sat, Apr 05 2008, Timothy Hobbs wrote:

[ Gnus ]
> One thing, it is the one part of emacs that really requires you to
> restart after making significant config changes.  

Huh?  You must be doing some strange config changes if it requires you
to restart Gnus or even Emacs!

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo---  |  PGP key available  |  http://rsteib.home.pages.de/

Re: Soliciting Recommendations for a Mail Client

[Timothy Hobbs]

Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc> writes:

> On Sat, Apr 05 2008, Timothy Hobbs wrote:
>
> [ Gnus ]
>> One thing, it is the one part of emacs that really requires you to
>> restart after making significant config changes.  
>
> Huh?  You must be doing some strange config changes if it requires you
> to restart Gnus or even Emacs!
When configuring gnus for the first time, one can end up adding methods,
splitters, to lists.  Because these lists are added to instead of overwritten in
some cases.  It can be help full to just restart emacs instead of trying to
unlink symbols.  I can't give you specific examples.  But I can assure you that
this is the case.  Oh, one example I can give is if you setq specific options
with imap, and then delete these setqs the options are still set for that
session of emacs.

Timothy

Re-loading ~/.gnus.el (was: Soliciting Recommendations for a Mail Client)

[Reiner Steib]

On Sat, Apr 05 2008, Timothy Hobbs wrote:

> When configuring gnus for the first time, one can end up adding
> methods, splitters, to lists.  

`add-to-list' does nothing if `element' is already present in the
list.

> Because these lists are added to instead of overwritten in some
> cases.  It can be help full to just restart emacs instead of trying
> to unlink symbols.  I can't give you specific examples.  But I can
> assure you that this is the case.  Oh, one example I can give is if
> you setq specific options with imap, and then delete these setqs the
> options are still set for that session of emacs.

I'm puzzled about what you mean.  Please show the code.

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo---  |  PGP key available  |  http://rsteib.home.pages.de/

Re: Soliciting Recommendations for a Mail Client

[Xavier Maillard]

   Hopefully I won't start a flame war...

   I've been using mutt for a bit over 10 years now, but I'm feeling the
   irresistible pull to deeper integrate my life with Emacs.

Dunno for the other people but I like very much rmail. It is
pretty basic and does not come with fancy features but it is easy
to use, is bundled with emacs.

The only big cons is that it just does not play well with MIME
(though I do not care since I do not like to attach anything but
inlined content to a mail. I do not like to receive attachment by
mail just patches or things similar.)

Rmail has a brother: VM. VM overloads rmail in many ways
including MIME support. It's worth trying it if you feel rmail is
too austere for you.

Another popular MUA is probably Gnus which can deal with
everything POP/IMAP/NNTP and various other things (slashdot, rss,
...). Though it is very powerful (I used it for several years) I
switched to a more "basic" MUA (rmail) since I did not need all
features bundled with Gnus.

Hope that'll help.

	Xavier
-- 
http://www.gnu.org
http://www.april.org
http://www.lolica.org

Re: Soliciting Recommendations for a Mail Client

[Xavier Maillard]

   One thing, it is the one part of emacs that really requires you to restart after
   making significant config changes.

Huh ? I no longer use Gnus but I never had to restart neither
gnus nor emacs for any configuration changes I made. What does
make you think you should restart ?

	Xavier
-- 
http://www.gnu.org
http://www.april.org
http://www.lolica.org

Re: Soliciting Recommendations for a Mail Client

[Tim X]

Peter Jones <mlists@pmade.com> writes:

> Hopefully I won't start a flame war...
>
> I've been using mutt for a bit over 10 years now, but I'm feeling the
> irresistible pull to deeper integrate my life with Emacs.
>
> I'm sure that there are plenty of people on this list that would love
> to recommend their Emacs-based MUA to me, so please go for it.
>
> My mail currently comes in via sendmail, which then uses maildrop as
> the delivery agent.  Maildrop filters my mail and then drops it into
> one of several Maildir directories in ~/mail.
>
> I'm hoping to find something that works with my existing delivery
> setup, since I also sometimes use IMAP externally.  I'd be using Emacs
> local to the MTA and MDA, however.
>
> Thanks!


I've found that VM, mew and wonderlust are all quite good. I mainly use
VM as that was the first emacs mail client I used. It has gone through a
perod of less than desirable active maintenance, but now it is bieing
actively maintained and developed again. It has integration with bbdb
(address book plus more), emacs 22 pgp support, personality crisis (for
setting different return addresses depending on various criteria (good
for using work/home/other addresses easily. easy customization of mime
handling and the use of internal/external mime handlers etc. 

Mew and wonderlust are also quite good and have much of the same
functionality but tend to do everything themselves and not use other
packages as much, such as bbdb. 

mh-e is quite good as well is you want to use mh style mailboxes. VM
uses its own mbox style mail folders. mew can handle maildir and mbox
and I can't remember what wonderlust uses. 

HTH

Tim

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au

Re: Soliciting Recommendations for a Mail Client

[Xavier Maillard]

   > Hopefully I won't start a flame war...
   >
   > I've been using mutt for a bit over 10 years now, but I'm feeling the
   > irresistible pull to deeper integrate my life with Emacs.

   I've found that VM, mew and wonderlust are all quite good. I mainly use
   VM as that was the first emacs mail client I used. It has gone through a
   perod of less than desirable active maintenance, but now it is bieing
   actively maintained and developed again.

This is the main reason why I quitted. I am happy to see this has changed.

   mh-e is quite good as well is you want to use mh style mailboxes. VM
   uses its own mbox style mail folders. mew can handle maildir and mbox
   and I can't remember what wonderlust uses. 

I have tested MH-E which is great but mh is hard to use. MH-E
does not integrate fully with mh IMO (There are many things that
mh supports and that you can't really use easily when in MH-E).

	Xavier
-- 
http://www.gnu.org
http://www.april.org
http://www.lolica.org

Re: Soliciting Recommendations for a Mail Client

[Dmitri Minaev]

On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 7:12 AM, Peter Jones <mlists@pmade.com> wrote:
>  I'm sure that there are plenty of people on this list that would love
>  to recommend their Emacs-based MUA to me, so please go for it.

I found the approach used by Gnus too original and chose Wanderlust.
Very good support of IMAP, including server-side search and offline
mode. The support of charsets other than Latin-1 is not perfect, but
not as complicated as in Gnus.

-- 
With best regards,
Dmitri Minaev

Russian history blog: http://minaev.blogspot.com

Re: Soliciting Recommendations for a Mail Client

[Sébastien Vauban]

Hi,

> One thing, it is the one part of emacs that really requires you
> to restart after making significant config changes.

If you change `defcustom's, maybe?

-- 
Sébastien Vauban

Re: Soliciting Recommendations for a Mail Client

[Reiner Steib]

On Mon, Apr 07 2008, Dmitri Minaev wrote:

> I found the approach used by Gnus too original and chose Wanderlust.

What does "too original" mean?

[ Wanderlust ]
> The support of charsets other than Latin-1 is not perfect, but not
> as complicated as in Gnus.

Huh?  You don't need any setup with regards to charsets in Gnus at all
(at least if you use a current version of Emacs, i.e. Emacs 22).  If
some special complicated settings are necessary, please report it as a
bug.

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo---  |  PGP key available  |  http://rsteib.home.pages.de/

Re: Soliciting Recommendations for a Mail Client

[Dmitri Minaev]

On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 2:30 AM, Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 07 2008, Dmitri Minaev wrote:
>
>  > I found the approach used by Gnus too original and chose Wanderlust.
>
>  What does "too original" mean?

"If you are used to traditional mail readers, but have decided to
switch to reading mail with Gnus, you may find yourself experiencing
something of a culture shock," says the manual, and a shock it was.
"Gnus, by default, handles all its groups using the same approach.
This approach is very newsreaderly--you enter a group, see the
new/unread messages, and when you read the messages, they get marked
as read, and you don't see them any more."  I know that if I forced
myself into using Gnus for a month or two, I would've got used to this
approach, but I found no real reasons to do so. I couldn't find the
mail I needed, then they suddenly sprang up, then my mailbox was full,
then I gave up. I use Gnus as a very good newsreader, the best I know,
but for mail I have tools that suit me better :)

>  Huh?  You don't need any setup with regards to charsets in Gnus at all
>  (at least if you use a current version of Emacs, i.e. Emacs 22).  If
>  some special complicated settings are necessary, please report it as a
>  bug.

It's not a bug. Or, even if it is, it's a conceptual bug of the
Russophone internet. There are three encodings used for Cyrillic
alphabet, besides UTF-8. Some newsgroups require me to use one of them
and some mail recipients want me to send mail in other encodings. My
.gnus file sets 9 variables and calls 1 function to make Gnus work as
I want it to. I confess that this setup was inherited from Emacs 19 or
20, if my memory serves well, but I'm afraid of changing anything :).
In .wl file, the equivalent setup required 4 variables and 1 function
call.

-- 
With best regards,
Dmitri Minaev

Russian history blog: http://minaev.blogspot.com

Re: Soliciting Recommendations for a Mail Client

[Peter Jones]

Dmitri Minaev wrote the following on Tue, Apr 08, 2008 at 02:43:46PM +0500:
> "If you are used to traditional mail readers, but have decided to
> switch to reading mail with Gnus, you may find yourself experiencing
> something of a culture shock," says the manual, and a shock it was.
> "Gnus, by default, handles all its groups using the same approach.
> This approach is very newsreaderly--you enter a group, see the
> new/unread messages, and when you read the messages, they get marked
> as read, and you don't see them any more."  I know that if I forced
> myself into using Gnus for a month or two, I would've got used to this
> approach, but I found no real reasons to do so. I couldn't find the
> mail I needed, then they suddenly sprang up, then my mailbox was full,
> then I gave up. I use Gnus as a very good newsreader, the best I know,
> but for mail I have tools that suit me better :)


I only played with Gnus for about 30 minutes so far, but the message
disappearance did have me a bit confused.  I'd have to believe there
is a configuration variable to turn this off.  Anyone know what it is?

-- 
Peter Jones
http://pmade.com

cyrillic newsgroups in Gnus (was: Soliciting Recommendations for a Mail Client)

[Reiner Steib]

On Tue, Apr 08 2008, Dmitri Minaev wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 8, 2008, Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc> wrote:
>>  Huh?  You don't need any setup with regards to charsets in Gnus at all
>>  (at least if you use a current version of Emacs, i.e. Emacs 22).  If
>>  some special complicated settings are necessary, please report it as a
>>  bug.
>
> It's not a bug. Or, even if it is, it's a conceptual bug of the
> Russophone internet. There are three encodings used for Cyrillic
> alphabet, besides UTF-8. Some newsgroups require me to use one of them
> and some mail recipients want me to send mail in other encodings. My
> .gnus file sets 9 variables and calls 1 function to make Gnus work as
> I want it to. I confess that this setup was inherited from Emacs 19 or
> 20, if my memory serves well, but I'm afraid of changing anything :).
> In .wl file, the equivalent setup required 4 variables and 1 function
> call.

Unless you show us the code, it's hard to tell if it can be done more
simple or if its not required anymore.  If your interested, let's
discuss this on <ding@gnus.org>.

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo---  |  PGP key available  |  http://rsteib.home.pages.de/

Re: Soliciting Recommendations for a Mail Client

[Reiner Steib]

On Tue, Apr 08 2008, Peter Jones wrote:

> I only played with Gnus for about 30 minutes so far, but the message
> disappearance did have me a bit confused.  I'd have to believe there
> is a configuration variable to turn this off.  Anyone know what it is?

Please use gnu.emacs.gnus aka gmane.emacs.gnus.user for further
questions about Gnus.

,----[ (info "(gnus)Group Parameters") ]
| `display'
|      Elements that look like `(display . MODE)' say which articles to
|      display on entering the group.  Valid values are:
| 
|     `all'
|           Display all articles, both read and unread.
| 
|     `an integer'
|           Display the last INTEGER articles in the group.  This is the
|           same as entering the group with `C-u INTEGER'.
| 
|     `default'
|           Display the default visible articles, which normally includes
|           unread and ticked articles.
| 
|     `an array'
|           Display articles that satisfy a predicate.
| 
|           Here are some examples:
| 
|          `[unread]'
|                Display only unread articles.
| 
|          `[not expire]'
|                Display everything except expirable articles.
| 
|          `[and (not reply) (not expire)]'
|                Display everything except expirable and articles you've
|                already responded to.
| 
|           The available operators are `not', `and' and `or'.
|           Predicates include `tick', `unsend', `undownload', `unread',
|           `dormant', `expire', `reply', `killed', `bookmark', `score',
|           `save', `cache', `forward', `unseen' and `recent'.
| 
| 
|      The `display' parameter works by limiting the summary buffer to
|      the subset specified.  You can pop the limit by using the `/ w'
|      command (*note Limiting::).
`----

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo---  |  PGP key available  |  http://rsteib.home.pages.de/

Re: Soliciting Recommendations for a Mail Client

[Bill Wohler]

Peter Jones <mlists@pmade.com> writes:

> I'm sure that there are plenty of people on this list that would love
> to recommend their Emacs-based MUA to me, so please go for it.

Hi Peter,

Sorry for the long delay, but I've been buried with the Kepler project
(kepler.nasa.gov).

Of course I have to recommend MH-E!

From http://mh-e.sourceforge.net/:

    MH-E is the Emacs interface to the MH mail system. It offers all
    the functionality of MH, the visual orientation and simplicity of
    use of a GUI, and full integration with Emacs and XEmacs,
    including thorough configuration and online help.

    MH-E allows one to read and process mail very quickly: many
    commands are single characters; completion and smart defaults are
    used for folder names and aliases. With MH-E you compose outgoing
    messages in Emacs. This is a big plus for Emacs users, but even
    non-Emacs users have been known to use MH-E after only learning
    the most basic cursor motion commands.

    Additional features include:

        * attractive text rendering with font lock
        * composition and display of (MIME) attachments such as photos
        * display of images and HTML within the Emacs frame
        * folder browsing with speedbar
        * threading
        * ticking messages
        * lightning-fast full-text indexed searches of all of your email
        * virtual folders to view ticked and unseen messages, search results
        * multiple personalities
        * signing and encrypting
        * spam filter interaction
        * XFace, Face, X-Image-URL header field support with picons 

    MH is Rand's Mail Handler, whose functionality is available in MH,
    nmh and GNU mailutils.  

There's a brief introduction and tutorial in the manual at:

  http://mh-e.sourceforge.net/manual/

Here's the page of mailing lists, where you can read about the
experiences of recent converts :-):

  https://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=13357

-- 
Bill Wohler <wohler@newt.com>  http://www.newt.com/wohler/  GnuPG ID:610BD9AD