Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[YUE Daian <sheepduke@gmail.com>]

On 2018-09-12 22:10, Emanuel Berg <moasen@zoho.com> wrote:
> Ryan Lloyd wrote:
>
>> I was wondering if someone could help me.
>>
>> I am tying to get emacs to read and send
>> e-mails to my email account (not gmail).
>
> Many people, and in particular the Gnus users,
> will argue that Emacs Gnus is a better choice
> for mails to and from Emacs than Rmail.
> Gnus can do many other things as well, which
> Rmail cannot, but even for just email, Gnus is
> better. One key aspect where Rmail is failing
> is it collects all the emails into a single
> file. This will soon be unmanageably big.
>
> -- 
> underground experts united
> http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

I agree that the way Rmail handles your mail (in one big file) is not
good enough for modern usage.

I have used several mail clients for Emacs:
Gnus -> Mew -> Mu4e -> Notmuch.
(All on one old i5 Thinkpad.)

Notmuch is what I finally settled in.
It provides Google like search facility together with tag-based email
management.

For example query "tag:attachment from:john" returns emails sent from
John that have attachments.

Also a shining point is that it does not touch original
files in your maildir. And it is super fast and easy to setup.

Gnus is very powerful especially for reading feeds because it was
designed initially for reading news groups.
It has some unique features like mail auto-expiration etc.

However the disadvantage is that it is really slow. 2000+ emails in one
group will stuck it for a long time every time I open the mail box. Also
it is really complicated to setup and hack.

Mew is not that famous. It was faster than Gnus but it moves your mails
to its own directory with integer names, which I do not really like.

Mu4e is interesting. If I recall correctly, it used to be based on
Notmuch but later got changed. It is similar to Notmuch, but I dislike
the difficulty to configure its home screen. And it was slower than
Notmuch on my machine.


This is just my personal idea based on my experiences. Hope that helps.

Danny