Re: Reading/Managing mail with emacs

[floyd@apaflo.com (Floyd L. Davidson)]

Andrew Walrond <andrew@walrond.org> wrote:
>So, a quick google reveals VM as the front runner for email. Am I right?
>Any gotchas or missing features to be aware of?

GNUS is the heavy weight champ.

A few hints at what can be done...  my ~/.gnus.el file
is 58k bytes.  I'm not really any great shakes at
hacking elisp either; but over the years things get
added here and there. :-)

The one "problem" with running gnus is that it
necessarily creates a large number of buffers,
customizes menus, etc etc; and basically takes over
Emacs.  If you run Emacs as an edit server (highly
recommended), it works much better to invoke an Emacs
process separately from that server to run gnus for
Usenet and email.

I read Usenet and email all as one application.  Email
"groups" appear to just be added newsgroups.  (A
separate process actually fetches the mail; hence, when
newgroups get updated, new email is also transfered to
control of gnus.)

It works very nicely that way, and eventually you might
get around to such things as customized keybindings,
filters, and who knows what.  The initial configuration
is not simple though!  For example, you would probably
want each mailing list to be seen as a distinct
"newsgroup", and you might want you outgoing mail to
those groups archived separately.  You also might want
distinct headers and/or signature lines for each group.
That's just for starters...

Look for example configurations on the net, and check
out gnu.emacs.gnus.

-- 
Floyd L. Davidson <http://www.apaflo.com/floyd_davidson>
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)              floyd@apaflo.com